Laurel Meister is a Laguna Beach artist whose work is featured each summer in the Sawdust Art Festival.

She needed a site to market and sell her artwork that would be easy to maintain and update. She also wanted a sketchbook to be a part of the site where she could share works in progress with her fans. Laurel’s own artwork and sketches were used as the basis for the site design to carry her style through the entire site.

Web design: Natalie MacLees
Web development: Natalie MacLees
Technology: WordPress (running on a Windows server!)

Digitwirl is a weekly video that introduces and explains technology to simplify your life, save time and money, and make things more fun.

To solve the problem of archiving, organizing and featuring a weekly video, the WooTube them by WooThemes was customized. Out of the box, WooTube offers some great features for handling video. In this case, its already useful features were extended with a custom taxonomy, separate styles for regular blog posts, custom home page, featured post animated widget, and custom menus.

Web Design: Carley Knobloch
Web Development: Natalie MacLees
Technology: WordPress and jQuery

Author Matthew McGough had a web site that was mostly focused on promoting his first book, Bat Boy. But with a variety of different work to promote and a new major project in the works, he wanted a major update along with the ability to post updates and new information on his own.

We worked with him to create a new minimalistic design to feature his work and built the site on WordPress to make it easy not only for Matthew to post his own new content, but for his fans to post comments and feedback directly on the site.

Web Design: Mark Tapio Kines
Web Development: Natalie MacLees
Technology: WordPress

This site was originally designed as a small collection of static HTML files by Natalie MacLees in 2004. Ninno, our client, still loved the design, but the site was in need of some updating.

Keeping the same basic design, we made it more modern by making the colors a bit darker and richer and making the design elastic to the browser window size. To make the site easy to update, it was built on WordPress.

Web Design: Natalie MacLees
Web Development: Natalie MacLees
Technology: WordPress

This was a little bit of an unusual project in that the client had a great sense of style and design skills of her own. She had such a good idea of what she wanted, that she turned over a rough PSD to us to show what kind of design she had in mind.

It was a really good foundation, so we were able to just take the ball and run with it. The logo and top banner of the site as well as the general layout all came directly from Vanesa Rey, founder of Campus Confidant. We added some details, touched up some spacing, and then integrated the design into a custom WordPress template.

Web Design: Vanesa Rey, Shoichi Shingu and Natalie MacLees
Web Development: Natalie MacLees
Technology: WordPress

Kari Miller, PhD wanted a bold, strong, and warm identity for her business, Miller Educational Excellence. It was important to convey the professionalism of her staff, the reliability of the methods used, and the warmth and sense of fun with which Dr. Miller and her staff approached their sessions with the students.

A deep slate blue and lighter tones were used to anchor the site and lend an air of professionalism, while a bright orange brought warmth and liveliness. A curved flag shape motif brought softness and fun to the design to keep things from appearing too boxy and stuffy.

The logo features a student reaching for a star with the support of the ‘l’ in Miller – a fitting analogy for Miller Educational Excellence’s support of students.

Web Design: Allure theme from StudioPress customized by Natalie MacLees
Web Development: Natalie MacLees
Logo Design and Identity Development: Natalie MacLees
Photo Retouching: Shoichi Shingu
Technology: WordPress and Moo Tools

Teresina Goheen is a Pilates and Gyrotonic instructor who wanted to step away from the neutral color schemes and nature photos that usually typify her industry and create a more dynamic design that reflected her high-energy personality.

We worked with Teresina to develop a black and white design with bits of bright red to bring attention and emphasis. Her logo is simple and clean, works well in a variety of colors, and most importantly, shows an openness in the heart chakra.

Subtle animations were added to the web site for additional interest.

Web Design: Natalie MacLees
Web Development: Natalie MacLees
Techology: WordPress, jQuery
Business Card Design: Natalie MacLees

Sindoni Consulting and Management Services, Inc. (SCMS) wanted a very simple web site to promote their business experience on a variety of large-scale projects.

They already had a logo and had already chosen “USC red” as their business’s signature color.

We created a simple site in shades of red, allowing the focus to be on the projects themselves and the gorgeous photos and architectural renderings that often accompany those projects.

Web Design: Shoichi Shingu
Web Development: Tammy Wilson and Natalie MacLees
Technology: WordPress

The Shampoo Lounge wanted a fun and dynamic web site to promote their fun and hip salon. Owners Michael Storms and David Jensen have create a mid-century hip feel and swanky atmosphere for their clients and they wanted that unique style reflected in their web site.

Originally, the web site was built in Flash to take advantage of animations and music, but over time maintenance of the site and search engine optimization proved challenging. So they embarked on a project to overhaul the web site without Flash but still keeping as much of the fun and dynamism as possible.

jQuery was used to create fun animations, custom scrollbars and asynchronous navigation while a tiny bit of Flash was recruited to play music from an old time radio in the corner of the site with working controls.

To make maintenance and search engine optimization easier, the site was build on WordPress.

Web Design: Natalie MacLees
Web Development: Natalie MacLees
Technology: WordPress and jQuery