Working with Propaganda AK to get their site up was a breeze… Mainly due to the fact that Mitch Kitter is an amazing photographer and we would be showcasing his work throughout the site.  Photos can make or break a site, so with a plethora of good material to choose from, it was hard to go wrong here.

We stuck with a monochromatic layout for the navigation and other site elements to help highlight the colors in each of the photos.  Also, we went with full-page backgrounds with hidden elements to really bring his pictures to life.  We basically used his work as the design and threw in some minimalist UI elements to help navigate the site.

The admin area is set up so that the user can select the origin point of each full-page photograph.  That way, the subject or focus of each image can always be on screen no matter what size the users browser is.  Pretty crafty…

Our only hiccup was dealing with some bad hosting issues through a 3rd party provider… That took some configuring to get our load times down from 17 seconds… No the site runs smooth and fast!

My Branch Office was a super-quick site that WebSmith Intl threw together in collaboration with Seth Stell.  The whole process went from inception to live in about a week and a half!  We kept the dev very simple on this project because it is a start up company and there’s always a budget (and usually a very tight one) with startups.

The idea behind the company is to create a professional work environment for people trying to start their own businesses who are coming from bigger corporations.  A lot of coworking spaces have a start-up feel to them with things like liquor cabinets, pool/ping-pong tables, video games, etc… My Branch Office is trying to reach out to those professionals that feel more comfortable with business casual and water cooler conversations.  Seattle is definitely a great area to set an environment like this up in.

For the dev, the homepage features a full width responsive slideshow and a few media queries to make sure everything stays nice and neat no matter what size browser you have.  The other nice feature within the site are the headings and how there is a full width bar leading to each title.  This was a little tricky to accomplish until we decided to fall back on web-safe fonts.  ALWAYS use web fonts if you need to lay things out based on height.  Non web-safe fonts can behave unexpectedly and produce some interesting results.

All in all, this project was very easy and fun to work on. And there should be a 2.0 coming in the near future…

DJ Mixta B, also known as Bryan Restrepo, was brought to me by one of my friends, Hellen Fleming.  He’s a local DJ and one of the best in town, and has also had the opportunity to travel around the states and perform for larger crowds.

Working on his site was great because we had the usual consultation and hashed out some basic ideas of features, but from there he left it up to WebSmith to design and develop the site.  This is our favorite kind of project!

We decided on a lighter theme with electric blue accents to fit his personality better.  The homepage has a vertical slideshow with vertical navigation to help get away from the mass of left/right sliders.  We liked the idea of a responsive slider that drops images into the site vs shuffling them around.  Also, the background is parallaxed against the body content to add some real 3D depth to all of the floating content.  That’s also why we decided to go with a semi-full width layout to help showcase that feature.  The homepage features his upcoming events organized by date that automatically remove themselves after the event has expired.  Very handy for those super late nights and when you don’t feel like updating your site the next day…

All of the blue highlights that are around the sidebar content as well as the footer were created using only CSS.  CSS3 has a very handy “content” selector that helps you actually generate elements before and after a particular CSS selector.  I’m a big fan of this for non-essential features because of course, anyone running anything earlier than IE9 probably won’t get the joy out of it that the rest of us are….

Overall, super fun project and we will be working with eachother in the future on more business and branding ventures.

The boys over and Born & Bred gave me a call a little while back telling me that is was time to spice things up for the holidays!  The wanted to expand their current site to encompass a few more elements, and I took the opportunity to refine a few things about the original that bugged me.

I created a semi-responsive layout for them that ranges from 960px – 1440px.  The layout they have works well for anything above 960px+ and will maintain a proper aspect ratio.  I had to use scaling images with some CSS trickery to accomplish this, as well as a little JS failsafe protection to make sure the slideshow on the homepage was able to be responsive as well.

One of the things that bugged me about the original site was that the products were set to “float:left” in order to maintain the most products possible per row… So, if your browser window could almost fit 4 products on screen and was only showing 3, they would all be offset to the left. Quite nasty for site balance…  I went ahead and updated this by using Isotope.js (and for those of you who are familiar with Masonry.js, this is like it’s father).  With Isotope I was able to create a centered layout that was responsive and allowed the maximum number of products per row.  It has a nifty little CSS transition associated with it as well if you give it a resize…

There’s more to come from B&B, so I’ll leave a little room to for future updates…

There’s a lot of information associated with the AFC and it needed a place to get that info out.  Sarah (owner / operator) had issues with past sites and their inability to be updated, having crowded layouts, and just overall not being very user friendly.  I opted to change that on the latest re-design of the Alaska Fighting Championship website.  This is the sites 2nd season, so I have already beat the past sites longevity track records…

Editors have the ability to add/edit the following areas: Home News, Events ( as well as updating each past event with fight outcomes), Galleries (hosted by SmugMug), and the Store (indirectly via an iFrame).  I don’t enjoy using iFrames to embed content but sometimes there are no other options.

I recently re-did the backend this year and added a few things like date pickers, better image uploaders, and repeatable content to make it easier on any editors of the site.

There are a few more things I would like to do to the site, but it all kinda depends on the clients schedule, which is a very, very, very busy one…

Scenery Creative is owned and operated by my long time pal Joe Hamming.  They are currently based out of Boulder, CO but he started the business in Alaska before we even hit 21.  Since then, he has grown his company to serve bands and businesses worldwide, even for large companies such as Warner Bros.

All the site design was done by Scenery Creative and we did a lot of planning together on how different elements were going to interact with one another.  There’s several areas that required different size images and layouts of projects to enable users with multiple ways to access the internal content.  The more ways there are to get a user to the content they want, the better.  We kept the JavaScript elements to a minimum, other than some form elements and the basic slideshow.  I also used jQuery Masonry for the portfolio area.  Masonry is just a life saver when developing grid layouts.

I also really focused on giving SC the ability to update every piece of content on the site.  That was a downfall of Scenery Creative 1.0 in that there really wasn’t much content other than the project pages.  And even on those pages, they were tough to get to because of random organization and other miscellaneous features that had been scrapped together… We had both progressed since the first version of the site was launched and decided it was time for a big makeover.  Something that would actually start generating some serious traffic for his business.

Behold, Scenery Creative 2.0!

Alaska Denali Winery is owned and operated by Mike & Cathy Bessent and they offer a hands-on experience to crafting unique and individual wines for their customers.  The way it works is a customer chooses the style of wine they would like, then they get all of the elements necessary for crafting the wine and put it all together to get things started.  It usually involves some kind of party/celebration and then after it goes into the carboy, the winery will do the rest.  They handle all of the maintenance and distilling, essentially all of the dirty work associated with creating your own wine.  It’s an economical process for customers because they don’t need to invest in all of the necessary equipment to produce a wine at their home, and have the advantage of experienced individuals taking care of their product.  Once it’s all finished, the customer will come back in and have a bottling party and walk away with about 18-24 bottles of wine.  Not a bad deal…

Now that everyone is up to date on what they do, I can talk a little bit about what I did for them…

I developed a site that would encompass all of the information about their business, including their selection of wines, which is quite extensive.  They can also add specials, latest news, images, and just about anything else they wanted to the site because I made the majority of it customizable as well as updatable.  I may have overwhelmed them with the amount of features I presented however… I tend to do that sometimes because I’m always trying to go bigger and better on every project…

There are a few pictures on the site that I did the photography for.  A couple in the slideshow and some in the descriptions of the wine.  We tried to capture some pour shots of the wine and a few of them turned out quite nice!  I included one of the shots we took of their decorations.

Even though this project was completed almost a year ago, I still offer free technical support and minor maintenance, as I do with almost every client.  If I can do it under 10 minutes, than it’s free… And if I overlooked something that is just now being noticed, that’s free too…

LeaseAlaska is a commercial real estate listing service designed to feature the properties of Western Enterprises in the Matanuska-Susitna and Anchorage/Eagle River areas.  It’s loaded with features, such as a custom search engine, that was built with the help of Kris Swanson, as well as featured properties, custom image uploads, and various other aspects.

LeaseAlaska.com was my first major project forcing me to break ground in many different areas.  Western Enterprises wanted a whole slew of features for their site, most of which I had never done before.  However, the best way to learn is to jump in and do it.  I spent hours upon hours of teaching myself each one of these topics, even before the contract was signed.  I wanted to make sure I was capable of providing everything they were requesting, because up until that point I had little experience in those areas.

The site came out good though.  I was able to integrate WordPress and build my own custom plug-ins for the site making everything easy for the client.  However, I did it with a list of guidelines they needed to follow because I was inventing a lot of my techniques through the development stage.  My functions.php file was a mess by the end of it all, but the site was working and looking good.

The site was originally launched in May of 2010 if I’m not mistaken and since then I have revisited some of the code and decided it’s time to give it an overhaul.  2 years of experience on the web is a long time and things have changed greatly, so as of this posting (September 25th, 2012) I will be going back in and editing the backend to make things run smoother for the client and the user.  I’ve learned a lot about site loading and SEO in the meantime and how it pertains to the structure of a site and I’m hoping to integrate all of these features making it smoother, better, stronger, and more powerful than ever!

One of my very first web projects as a professional.  Looking back on it I have to say that it still looks pretty good, at least on the front end… I know the css and code behind this is probably a little scary looking right now… But it works!  All the way down to Internet Explorer 6!

Western Enterprises is a local real estate company that specializes in commercial properties.  I landed the job by actually having Shirts Up located in one of their business parks.  They happened to see the first Shirts Up website I did and were interested in getting theirs re-done.  The previous Western Enterprises site was nothing more than  a glorified word document so anything I came up with looked amazing by comparison.  I’m not trying to take away from the site by saying that, I’m only pointing out that it was a good beginner project.

I did a lot of SEO on this project as well, consisting of keyword generating and ensuring that the proper elements were in place.  Keyword generating is a little old school for SEO but it does help.  However, I feel as though the benefits of having “keyword gems” within a site is drastically outweighed by the amount of work it takes to generate them.  Put another way, if I wanted to play in Excel all day I would have been an accountant…

Western is a static site and was created in HTML 4.0 so I had to manually code every page with headers and footers.  That might not sound like much to some, but after about 16 pages of copy-paste every time a change is made, it can get a little old…  Everything I do now is based in PHP because of it’s modular approach to delivering content.

This was definitely one of the quirkiest projects I have ever worked on, and I only say that because I was given a lot of go ahead to design the site around the Naughty Neighbor theme.  All of the “naughty’s” found through the site were my throwback to the branding.

I was actually given this project by Jontue of Headron Collider, because he had done the majority of the artwork for the tees they are selling.  He ended up recommending my company to them for the site development after I had done some work on his blog, and all of the tees were printed by Shirts Up.  I actually printed a good portion of them as well because my office is located inside Shirts Up and I happened to be the temp Manager when they placed the order.  The owners of NNW69 really have an eye for quality and know what they want.

As far as the site is concerned, it’s a basic startup eCommerce site.  We were looking for something simple to get the company off of the ground with out a lot of overhead and reoccurring costs.  There was talk about taking an eCommerce template but was eventually turned down because of the subscriptions and added merchant services.

The site is a completely custom layout/theme that I designed and the checkout process is handled by PayPal Standard. Much thanks to Garrett, Shannon, Jontue, and Ray.

Ray Gillespie is an Alaskan Lobbyist who needed a simple website that could be developed quickly.  The original goal was to have a static site with some basic content for being an Lobbyist in AK, but it quickly grew because I don’t like doing simple sites…

His website ended up incorporating a content management system as well as a responsive layout that breaks down for small screens, iPads, and iPhones.  Yes, all of this may have been overkill, but it’s what I do to keep things interesting on my end so that the project stay fun and I am able to learn as I develop. And, I like to follow the practice of under-promise and over-deliver.

I also took it upon myself to deliver a new look for his company by updating his branding.  Being a lobbyist in Ak, he didn’t really have a logo before, but I think everyone that has a professional business should have a logo of some sort.

I can’t claim the main Denali photo, but I did spend a few hours at the Loussac Library taking the portraits that you see in the sidebar.  Ray liked them so much that he had me print out a few for his kids…

Anchorage Brewing’s website was a long time in the making, mostly because of all the bells and whistles I wanted to feature within the site… We have a fullscreen layout complete with a set of media queries for smaller browsers (no mobile yet), as well as a full screen gallery page, site store, and some awesome JavaScript work to help showcase the beers on the homepage as well as the dedicated “Beer” section.

I highly recommend checking this site out and heading on over to the beers page after mousing over some of the beers on the home page to see what I’m talking about.  I had some assistance from Kris Swanson on implementing all of the JS necessary to have the parallax effect and smooth transitions on the Beers page.  When it comes to JavaScript, he’s the man to talk to.

At the time of this article, there is only one gallery up on the media page, and I happen to be taking credit for all of the photos featured there.  All of the bottle artwork was done by Shirts Up Serigraphics and they were kind enough to lend me the layer files necessary for making the parallax effect on the Beers page.

One of the many collaborations I have done with Joe from Scenery Creative.  He happened to be friends with the owner of this tattoo shop and proposed the idea of upgrading to the 21st century with a website.  I’m glad he took the advice and we were able to crank out a site together.

All the design and layout was done by Scenery Creative while all of the backend and WordPress development was handled by WebSmith.  There are a lot of backend features and available content areas for the client.  It’s entirely up to them whether they use it or not, however…

Another fun fact about this project – It was almost completely done while working abroad in the country of Belize.  I was lucky enough to land WebSmith some internet over there.

This was one of my favorite projects that I have ever done.  Since Shirts Up is a friend/business parter of WebSmith, I had a lot of creative control and wanted to do things right.

I took care of a lot of photography and photo editing for the site.  One of my favorite pieces being the owner (Ray Flores) shredding his logo on a longboard.  That piece has made it’s way into a few ads around Alaska as well.

This site is still a work in progress because I have the ability to constantly update and refine bits and pieces at my leisure.  It’ll never be finished, but at least it won’t need to be redesigned for a couple more years.

Shirts Up 3.0 can wait a little while…