Portfolio

At Ventura County Computers, our parent company, the primary design criteria was that the site had to be able to keep order out of more than 100 pages. On some pages, the boxes on the right become sub-menus while on others they advertise merchandise for sale or provide definition of terms. This required a three-column layout. We have a news feed in the right column that displays the last 4 Twitter tweets we wrote and the most recent Facebook post.

 

Lauterbach & Associates wanted a website that would expand as their list of clients and projects expanded. They also wanted a site that looked elegant and clean. The 4 small pictures at the top are entries to a drop-down menu system that hides most of the clutter, but still makes navigating easy. The left column on the home page is a Facebook link, showing the most recent post on their wall.

 

The Lake Casitas Recreation Area has more than 400 campsites and they wanted to include pictures of every campsite, plus tons of other goodies. And the information had to be updatable by staff quickly and easily. The pages are plain html with no scripting, so staff can use Macromedia Contribute to make changes to content but cannot accidentally change formatting, menus, etc. The total site has over 500 pages, contains a Flash slide show on the home page and yet is simple enough for staff to maintain without having to pay for outside support.

 

The Lions Club District that encompasses Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties (4-A3) wanted a site to communicate with the 38 member clubs covering a large, diffuse area. Naturally, they wanted all the forms the clubs submit to be included, but they also wanted the district roster to be available to district officers and contact information to be available to the public. If you click on "District Roster" you will see live data -- the entire district database is online, with the public invited to view only the contact information. District officers, naturally, can view all the data when traveling. More importantly, they are looking at the same data. It used to be that officers wouldn't always update their database when a new one was distributed.

 

The Channel Islands PC Users Group needed a site that could be easily maintained by a number of people. Their webmistress does most of the updating but some committee chairmen update their own pages. They wanted a uniform look and feel despite the number of contributors.

Incidentally, the background image of Anacapa in the Channel Islands has long been the club's logo, but in previous designs was always a space-consuming graphic on each page. By including it as a background image in CSS, we achieved the dual purpose of preserving content space and getting it outside the reach of accidental deletion by committee editors.

This design won first place (tie) in the large club division at the Association of PC Users Groups 2005 convention in competition with user groups from 25 nations.

 

Lutheran Church of Our Redeemer had a site that looked decent, but was too difficult to maintain. We kept the basic look of the old site, cleaned it up a bit, added some pictures and features and then modularized it so Pastor Brian Elster and staff could make changes more easily than in the past. We created the nested archive menus that are out of sight, but keep all the old Pastor messages available.

Staff can now keep the calendars and messages up to date without blowing something up.

 

ABC Auto Care wanted a compact site, but one with a reservation form as well as links to their Facebook and Twitter pages. They make frequent changes to their site, with special offers and pertinent information in the small boxes.

 

Located in North Carolina, Gulf Stream Mergers & Acquisitions wanted a clean site that would let them list all their businesses for sale easily and quickly. Several of the menu items on the left expand to show sub-menus when clicked on. This allows the site to have quite a few pages without cluttering up the menu.

 

Dr. Mercer wanted a simple site to introduce his practice to visitors. He wanted to be able to publish articles on the website (he's been lax about actually doing that), but the menu allows for it.

 

This is Toby's personal page. He publishes occasional essays on current event issues. The pictures are of lotuses in his koi pond (assuming anyone cares).