Small Business Design/Tech

Michael Oliveras is a long-time union carpenter making the entrepreneurial jump and starting his own business: Mike's Precision Carpentry, serving the New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware from his shop in Hammonton, NJ. He came to me looking for a webpage to advertise his new enterprise.

It's a simple design, a typical small-business site of half-a-dozen pages. The color scheme matches his business cards for a bit of branding. Oliveras faced a problem typical for new businesses: a lack of good photos. The work he's done for many years is not technically his own (per the employment contracts) so for now the pictures are a mix of the few jobs he has done on his own and a few stock images. I'm sure he'll have a well-rounded portfolio before long and we'll be able to fill out the site with his own work. In the meantimes, he added a couple of great pictures of him and his family on the "About Us" page to give it that personal touch.

See it live: www.mikes-precision-carpentry.com

Elisabeth is a painter and artist who specializes in original acrylic paintings and giclee prints of nature and South Jersey beach scenes. Her existing site was attractive, but it didn't have online ordering and she wasn't able to update it herself.

We put together a features list and then went through a round of concept screenshots which I built in Adobe Fireworks and Photoshop (you can see our work here!). Design in hand, I built a customized Movable Type site. A specialized template allows her to enter information about the each piece: medium, theme, price and the URL to it's image (most of which are hosted on Flickr). Movable Type pulls these together into various category and individual art pages, with automatically-generated Paypal "Buy" buttons for available pieces. We stressed search-engine visibility so there are many categories and they all cross-link with each painting.

Visit: Elisabeth Olver

A local client from Tabernacle in Burlington County came to me with an interesting project. He's owned a commercial cleaning company for a number of years and has heard his share of horror stories about the cleaning services clients hired before finding him! This experience led him to write a PDF e-book about how to hire the right cleaning service. What a great idea and a what a useful book this is for small business owners.

The site's on a bit of a budget so it's a simple design, with colors and general look-and-feel borrowed from a site the client likes. Simple editing comes via CushyCMS. When customers click to buy, they are sent to Paypal for the actual transaction and then forwarded to E-Junkie, which provides the automated and integrated PDF download.

Visit the site: Office Manager's Guide to Hiring the Best Cleaning Service

Ginny Christensen is the force behind Strategy for Growth, LLC, a Wyncote, PA consulting firm that provides strategic planning, board development, executive coaching, and leadership team development for independent schools and nonprofits. The site is fairly simple. It's built in WordPress and has rudimentary e-commerce with a Paypal option for purchasing books.

Visit: StrategyForGrowth.com

John Kindley is a lawyer in a solo practice in South Bend, Indiana. He came to me wanting a web design make-over for his self-designed WordPress site, along with some SEO advice and help with a form. John's a bit of a tinkerer so he's already moved on to a new design!

Visit: Kindley Law in South Bend Indiana

Client Testimonial:

"Martin provided great value in designing a website for my law practice. He was accessible and facilitated the process, despite our geographical distance, through email and telephone consultations. He was flexible in working with me to achieve what I was looking for within my budget." May 1, 2009

John Kindley, Lawyer.
Hired Martin as a Graphic/Web Designer in 2008
Top qualities: Personable, Good Value, High Integrity

A site put together by two consultants to the natural food industry. All pages were editable by a Movable Type powered content management system. A notable feature was a e-commerce subscription function with private log-in pages. This consultancy business was closed in May 2008 and the site was taken down.

A multimedia website displaying the very colorful aquarium out near Norristown Pennsylvania. The Flickr photos are cached and display with Lightbox (a Slimbox clone) when clicked. Movies are included both as optimized-for-download WMV files and on a independent Youtube account. View Site.

Nick Watts is a piano instructor in the Oaklyn/Collingswood area of Camden County, South Jersey and wanted to advertise his services online. Be sure to check out the Entertainment page for music samples. I used Box.net to allow Nick to upload his own songs any times he wants!

Visit Site: Nick Watts Piano.

Vietnamese restaurateur and surf guru Tam shares photos and stories from one of Southeast Asia's best surfing towns. Hands down this is the most handsome photo site in my portfolio! Visit Site.

Website for Peter Blood & Annie Patterson, musicians most well known for their insanely-popular songbook Rise Up Singing. They sell books and tapes on the site (e-commerce handled ably and simply by Paypal) and they also have lots of high-quality content including a lot of hard-to-find Pete Seeger CDs. Movable Type is used as a content management system (CMS).

Technologies: Movable Type, Paypal. Visit Site.