Marketing and customer service site for Toby Hoogs Photography, a Hawaiian wedding photographer
| Toby Hoogs Photography | 2003 |
| Background | Toby Hoogs is a professional photographer on Hawaii's Big Island. Many of his clients come from the mainland for destination weddings, and they use the Web extensively to plan their wedding and shop for vendors. When I met Toby, he had a simple Web site that was functional but rather dated. He felt he was losing business to photographers with fancier sites that better showcased their work. He gave me a list of top-notch local talent and asked me to build him a site to compete with them. |
| Project | The core of the site is the Gallery, which displays some of Toby's favorite photographs. The site uses sophisticated JavaScript to let visitors browse the photos manually or sit back and watch an automated slideshow. The PHP-driven site is also easily updatable, allowing Toby to add or remove photos without touching the code. Another important aspect of the site is the Client Proofs section. A simple Web-based administration tool allows Toby to upload proofs to a private section of the site, where his clients can view their proofs and order reprints and enlargements. Proof pages are automatically integrated with PayPal's Shopping Cart API, greatly reducing the time Toby spends processing orders. |
| Results | Since the launch of the new site, Toby has been able to double his prices and still command as much business as he can handle. |
| Status | Up-and-running |
| View Site |
Gallery site for Flowers by Heidi, an upscale florist
| Background | Heidi Yamamoto saw the site I designed for Toby Hoogs, then tracked me down and asked me to build a similar site for her upscale floral design services. My then-fiancée and I happened to be in the market for a florist in Hawaii, so we worked out a trade. She provided some fabulous flowers for our recent wedding, and I built a site to showcase some of the fabulous flowers she's done for other weddings. |
| Project | The site is all about the flowers, so photos are big and bright and words are kept to a minimum. The PHP-backed site is specifically designed for the ultimate in update ease — adding photos is as simple as uploading images to the server. There's also an online questionnaire to help Heidi communicate with her mainland clients. |
| Status | Up-and-running |
| View Site |
Header design for Riverdeep.net, an interactive learning Web site
| Project | Riverdeep is an educational software company that produces consumer titles under the Broderbund, The Learning Company, and Edmark brands. They also develop products for in-school use under the Riverdeep name. Riverdeep.net was designed as a marketing umbrella for all the brands as well as a portal to their many Web-based products, which were sold by subscription directly to schools. I was primarily a GUI designer at Riverdeep, and those projects are detailed in the User Interface section of this site. But I was also responsible for overseeing the design of Riverdeep.net, particularly it's weekly educational magazine The Riverdeep Current. On the marketing side, I inherited most of the design from my predecessor. However, I did revamp the site header, adding a subtle Flash animation and a pull-down menu navigation system. I also expanded the collection of photos that randomly appear on the home page. |
| Status | Offline (link goes to local copy) |
| View Site |
Self-promotion site for Etheria Web Design
| Background | I co-founded Etheria Web Design in 1995. I designed this self-promotion site two years later. Etheria was positioning itself as Web site "re-designers", focusing our marketing efforts on companies that had Web sites built in the very early days of the industry and were now in need of a transformation. |
| Project | The loose, brush-stroke illustrations and paper textures gave it an organic and elegant look very different from the typical "look how tech we are" Web design of the day. But the innovative HTML techniques and then-cutting-edge JavaScript showed that we were tech-savvy as well. This dichotomy was echoed in the split-screen home page design — structured precision on one side, hand-drawn art on the other. Note: Since this site was built during the height of the browser wars, the live version used server-side browser detection to direct visiters to a version that would work best with their browser. The version shown here was designed for Netscape 4.x, but work's reasonably well in modern standards-based browsers. |
| Status | Offline (link goes to local copy) |
| View Site |
| Design/Production Team Members |
| Kurt Opsahl | JavaScript, CGI programming |
| Hans Opsahl | Copywriting, CGI programming |
Proof-of-concept design for Web.com
| Background | Of all the bizarre business stories from the dotcom era, the tale of Web.com is one of my favorites. The domain name, an obviously desirable one, was registered quite early on by a domain name speculator. But that speculation never paid off. In 1996, the Web Service Company, Inc. of Redondo Beach made a successful trademark ownership claim and took control of the domain. Web Service's business: laundry machines, and lots of them. Founded in 1947 by William E. Bloomfield (aka WEB), The Web Service Company owns and operates some 300,000 coin-op laundry machines. And a really cool domain name. |
| Project | But what to do with such a name? Web.com came to Etheria with the idea of building a directory of online shopping sites. In the days before Yahoo! Shopping and Froogle, this made a lot of sense. We built a proof of concept site, including an icon-based directory and a multi-level drill-down system. I was particularly fond of the 30-odd icons I designed for the directory pages. |
| Results | Unfortunately Web.com quickly realized that their real value was in the name itself, and their business model shifted to providing Web.com e-mail addresses and virtual domain names. They've since grown into a full-service hosting company. And the laundry business is going strong. |
| Status | New Business Model (link goes to screenshots) |
| View Site |
