Portfolio
PSD to HTML To WordPress
Featured Project
Underground Elephant: Lead Generation & Affiliate Marketing
In early 2011, I teamed up with some folks at my favorite web development company, PerfectSpace on a redesign of Undergound Elephant’s company site. Some talented Perfectspacer’s producted a design and I handled the coding and conversion to WordPress. The site has a clean, minimalistic feel (I really dig the light orange and gray) and a nice separation between the blog and news feeds on inner pages – all done on a single install of WordPress.
Underground Elephant is a top lead generation and affiliate marketing business based in San Diego, CA.
Views Of La Jolla – WordPress 3 Reinvents Real Estate
Michelle Silverman has been a realor in San Diego & La Jolla CA for over two decades and has been consistently ranked in the top 1-2% of Prudential sales professionals nationwide. When we went live with this redesign of her website in February 2011, she was featured in an article in Realtor Magazine titled Winning With WordPress and we got great feedback from lots of agents from all over the US who saw the article and found the site.
WordPress is a hot topic right now in the real estate world, and for good reason. In such a competitive industry, smart agents are adapting quickly to meet the changing needs of their tech-savvy customers head on. WordPress allows agents to build sites that integrate social media tools and low-cost, do-it-yourself approaches into their marketing mix, helping them get found, showcase their listings to buyers and generate leads that increase their business.
In a lot of ways the site is a re-think of how both agents and their clients use websites. The design is simple but sophisticated, and focuses on big visuals that highlight the La Jolla lifestyle and coastline. We also integrated her blog, flickr stream, and social media accounts tastefully into the design. Best of all, it’s still 100% WordPress, which means that Michelle and her team can manage the site themselves with ease.
WordPress 3 CMS + Blog
HTML To WordPress Conversion
The Rahvalor Blog
I had the opportunity to work with Rahvalor on a complete redesign of their company site and WordPress blog. Their creative team produced a design for the blog that matched the site, and I handled the conversion to WordPress. We got a lot done in a short amount of time and had a ton of fun in the process. Both sites went live with a fanfare of beautifully crafted emails and marketing.
Rahvalor has been a creative services company since 1999, but over the years the form those services have taken has changed quite a bit. As technology has shifted and new marketing opportunities arose, they’ve successfully adapted to meet the needs of their customers in order to best help them tackle new challenges and engage their customers online. After months of planning, tinkering and soul-searching, they decided to start 2011 with a rebrand and website redesign to better fit with their vision as a creative services company in today’s marketing ecosystem. They’ve decked the site out with lots of fun stuff and great information about how they can help their clients achieve success.
Green Box Homes Real Estate: Social Media Makeover
Kimberly Dotseth is the broker/owner Green Box Homes, a real estate firm in San Diego with a green touch. She was named a 5 Star broker by San Diego Magazine 3 years in a row (2008, 2009 and 2010) and was recently on HGTV’s “National Open House” in a host of episodes based in San Diego. To date, she has sold more than $161 million in real estate.
After working with Kimberly, I can see why she’s been so successful. She’s got an incredibly warm personality, an intense drive to please her clients and strong attention to detail. When she contacted me, she had a static website and she had just started dipping her toes into social media. Over the period of a few short weeks we gave her site and her online presence a complete makeover.
Now she’s blogging and engaging clients using social media tools daily. Her new site integrates all of her social media activity, including her Facebook business page and Twitter streams, and adds a few powerful real-estate specific features that makes her site usable for her clients like custom pages for her featured listings, beautiful interactive photo galleries and an integrated IDX tool so that clients can search for properties using the MLS right from her site.
Visit Site Green Box Homes On Facebook
WordPress Blog and Branded Social Media Footprint
WordPress Blog and Integrated Social Media Footprint
Scott Silverman, CNN Hero and Best Selling Author
Scott Silverman is the author of the best-selling book Tell Me No, I Dare You: A Guide for Living a Heroic Life and is both locally and nationally recognized as a leader in the field of workforce development. He has received numerous awards and honors including recently being named “CNN Hero of the Week” and the City of San Diego honored him by selecting February 19 as “ Scott Silverman Day” for his contributions to the community.
Scott’s site is built on Chris Pearson’s legendary Thesis WordPress Theme Framework, offering top-notch SEO and lightning-fast loading times. Using the Thesis Framework as a base allowed us to significantly reduce time and cost for the project. I built the site over the period of a weekend.
Scott does a lot of media appearances on broadcast news outlets like FOX 5, and KUSI news, so the site focuses heavily on foregrounding multimedia elements like video and streaming audio. Along with his social media streams that Scott uses to share updates with the world while on the road, we also integrated some additional email marketing features on the site to promote Scott’s book.
WordPress Blog, National Retailer
The Vineyard Vines Blog
Vineyard Vines is a national retailer in the U.S.A. that provides preppy clothing and accessories for men, women, and children. Founded in Marthas Vineyard in 1998, the company now has 11 high-end retail stores across the U.S., as well as a thriving online store at VineyardVines.com. Their signature ties are a favorite among high-profile politicians such as George Bush, John Kerry, Bill Clinton, Rudy Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
I was really excited when Lindsey, the Director of Brand Communications, contacted me and pitched me the idea of building Vineyard Vines a site that complemented their online store, where they could share their stories, photos and news, and interact with their customers. The company was already experiencing a lot of success interacting with their customers on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. They just needed a central place to bring it all together and create a sense of true community. And that’s just what we did with the new blog.
The site runs WordPress and is built on Chris Pearson’s Thesis Theme Framework, so it’s got top-notch SEO and great optimized code on the back end. We also included some nifty interactive social elements that pull in their Facebook Fan Page activity, Twitter feed, Flickr Photos and YouTube videos – all in one place, with a look and feel that matches their brand. The new blog integrates seamlessly with their online store front– there’s virtually no difference in look and feel, even though it runs on totally different software.
What I’m really happy about as a designer is that the fun-loving Vineyard Vines crew have embraced the idea of having a blog for all the reasons that makes blogs great. It’s awesome to see that they consistently post content that is true to what they stand for as a brand – living the good life. The blog is fun, full of personality and enthusiasm, and since the blog started, they’ve grown their online following at break-neck pace. Over 38,000 people have joined them on Facebook and they get hundreds of post views and comments daily via social media and their blog.
Corporate Website and Branded Social Media Footprint
Floord Ltd: Corporate Website and Portfolio Showcase
FLOORD is a commercial provider of polished concrete and natural stone flooring systems in Florida and the Caribbean. They serve a wide variety of client needs including construction chemical supplies and industrial flooring systems, as well as marble and concrete polishing for retail stores, office buildings and commercial outdoor spaces.
The site is a pure CMS implementation of WordPress and is built to showcase the company’s wide variety of offerings, expertise and workmanship. Some site extras include sleek drop down menus, light box photo galleries, and a slick Jquery accordian slider on the home page that doesn’t use flash – so it even looks good on mobile phones.
WordPress Blog and Branded Social Media Footprint
Non Profit: San Diego’s Second Chance Program Uses Social Media For Fund Raising and Community Building
Second Chance, a human services non-profit agency based out of San Diego that is committed to breaking the cycle of unemployment, poverty, and homelessness by offering job readiness training, employment placement assistance, mental health counseling, case management, and affordable housing referrals to people who desire to change their lives. Over the past 15 years Second Chance has assisted more than 24,000 economically disadvantaged and homeless persons in San Diego gain employment and leave poverty, gang affiliations, and crime.
This project created a new WordPress based blog and a branded social media footprint that matched the design of their 2009 annual report. It was great working with such a great group of people doing important work, and it’s good to see the non-profit continuing to successfully use a whole host of social media tools for fund raising, community awareness and outreach.
Photoshop to HTML To WordPress
Paradigm Services, Inc
Paradigm Services Inc. is a top commercial, government and health care service provider. They staff their own professionally skilled crews who provide a variety of different services, including solar energy, commercial renovation and fencing, commercial landscaping, custodial and snow removal services. Founded in 2002 by Shane Vazquez, the company has grown from a 3 person operation into a 100 plus person operation, servicing the greater Tri-State Area: New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts.
