Sites for or connected with performers and/or artists:
- Laura Love
Working with a musician as accomplished as Laura Love is a bit heady. There's an internal sense of wonder at the quality of her music, and the primary thought is how to design the site so that it's good enough to meet the quality of her music. Fortunately, she makes it easy. Every time a new CD or book comes out, there is already great design involved. So I see my role not so much as to design the site, but to remake it in a way to fit the design work so that it's consistent with the style of the product she's currently selling. This means the site has gone through quite a few iterations during the time I've been working on it, but it also keeps me thinking of new ways to keep it fresh and inventive.
- Kay Curtis
When Kay approached me about doing a web site, she showed me her current site. The content was good, but the appearance was lacking in color and integrated layout. Kay and I worked together to create a site for her that both showcased her work, but also used her own artwork to create the backdrops for the site and overall tone and style.
- Mud Time Theater
Mud Time was a neat challenge. They wanted something minimalistic and simple (my first try involved dancing letters in the title, which they nixed immediately (even though they thought it was cool that I tried it), so after some revisions, I came up with something very clean and low-key but still completely suited to their style.
Sites for businesses:
- Final Cut Movies
This was fun to design. Andy (the owner of the store) does some of his own design work, so we got to play around with his ideas about the layout of the site, and I got to figure out how to best meet his interests for the design work while still creating the site in such a fashion that it proved functional and easy to navigate. The collaborative effort worked well.
- Contemporary Music Store
This was a complicated site to design because of the inventory set-up. I had to create a custom database which tracked inventory based on both categories of item plus the companies. Then I had to build an interface which allowed Ed (the owner) to add his own inventory, remove items once sold, add new companies, categories, etc. Once I got it moving, however, I was really happy with the result.
- RadicalWeeds
This was one of my earliest large site designs, with images drawn entirely from the books they sell on the site. I'm no longer hosting the site, but they've kept the basic design work I did back in the mid 1990's, using the same colors, images, textures and look and feel that I originally created.
Personal sites:
- Julie Waters Music Site
I've designed and redesigned this site multiple times, but I like the basic structure of it now. My favorite element is how the background textures change every 10-15 minutes. It's a php script I wrote that bases the background on a function of date and time. This site makes strong use of databases (such as tracking the mp3 files, along with keyword categories to fit them) as well as a lot of interactive tools for end users (photo gallery, videos, etc.)
- Julie Waters Photography Site
This is probably the most complex site I've ever designed. It uses a database to track thousands of photos I've taken over the years, allowing people to browse and search photos by date, keyword category, location, using complex combination searches. It also tracks custom galleries I've created, allows end users to rate photos, tracking the ones most liked. There's nothing in here I can't customize to suit other clients, but this particular site is primarily a labor of love.
Julie Waters is everything you want in a web mistress: creative, quick, smart. She is very easy to work with and knows her stuff. Laura Love and I have been very impressed with Julie's management of LauraLove.net.
--Mary McFaul
representing Laura Love / Jo Miller & Her Burly Roughnecks
http://lauralove.net/
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