Effort
G.S. Haly
G.S. Haly, a long-operating and successful tea broker, wanted a site that spoke of the company's rich heritage and long tradition dating back to the 1800s. The client had reams of information to convey to both business partners and casual tea drinkers alike, and organizing the information into a hierarchy that was friendly and intuitive was job one. Working in tandem, development and design merged to create a technically sound and clean-running site while giving the impression of heavy design. We employed advanced CSS techniques to achieve a table-less layout and despite the modern savvy of the code, it never stands in the way of the classic, timeless aesthetic.
Rose Family Mortuaries
Designing a site for a funeral home presents a unique design challenge. Like funeral homes themselves, the design must be comforting and elegant, suggesting a certain dignity and hopefulness despite the plain fact that the business is focused on the passing of life. For the Rose family, their two funeral homes, Fremont Chapel of the Roses and Fremont Memorial Chapel, represent this sense of comfort despite the sorrow inherent in the proceedings. It took several dozen concept designs to come up with a simple, elegant layout using calm colors and light touches of class.
The site also features an Online Obituaries application custom built for Rose which allows faculty members to input timely updates for their customers and gives grieving families a chance to send obituary notices to friends and relatives via email with a quick copy/paste.
Splendid Products
Splendid Products are importers of tropical fruits specializing in Mangos, a popular fruit in many countries but relatively unknown in the States. Splendid wanted to educate the public about not just their business, but their flagship product as well. Armed with stacks of information we set out to provide Splendid with a virtual library of a site. An original design which ran for several years included two nearly identical versions of the site, one featuring Flash animations and design elements and the other using simple static images to accommodate older browsers, slower connections or users without the Flash Player plugin.
During our recent redesign we streamlined the maintenance process by eliminating one version of the site and instead focusing efforts on cleaner code and a more appealing overall design using deep, fruity reds and plenty of photographs taken by our expert in-house photographer. To allow Splendid to make timely updates for their customers, we installed an Open Source application giving them a customized blog and allowing them to easily keep their site content fresh and current. By not reinventing the wheel we can devote our time to concerns more relevant to our customers, save them time and money and offer greater feature sets in shorter amounts of time. Work smarter, not harder.
Harrington's Photography
A San Francisco-area professional photographer, Chris Harrington, wanted a site that accented his burgeoning wedding photography business. Weddings have common associations and a specific sensibility; designing a site which featured tons of wedding photographs needed to both tap those associations but also remain unique enough to not get lost in the shuffle. Our design team developed a striking custom logo and the site design was focused around several specific elements all using the client's photography as an inspiration and base.
The banner along the bottom of the site is customized Flash, showcasing how even a small, simple element using multimedia can add a memorable site experience (we used to call this kind of site “sticky”). Harrington's Photography also needed to feature an easy-to-use but attractive gallery browser which we accomplished using some very clean JavaScript that cost us very little in terms of resulting file size.
White Oak Press
When our sister company, White Oak Press, needed a new website, of course we were more than happy to oblige. White Oak is a respected printing firm in the San Francisco Bay Area, but most of their business is word-of-mouth, not resulting from heavy marketing pushes. As such the White Oak Press site needed to be attractive and informative but not filled with marketing fluff. The most important aspect of the site needed to be the contact information printed clearly on every page and the other focus was an online quote request form which allowed the printers to ensure that email-based requests for quotes contained enough information to give an accurate quote.
This site is a good example of giving a client what they really need, not what we want them to have. Splashy sites with lots of design elements and whiz-bang functionality are fun for designers and developers, but expensive for clients. A design firm that can give you what you need and not what they want is a design firm that puts customers first.
Fallick Insurance Services
Fallick Insurance is a good example of what is often referred to as a Brochure Site. That is to say, it has little in the way of advanced functionality or complex design elements such as customized web applications or multimedia, and the contents within could easily be transferred to (or as is more often the case, from) a printed brochure.
Many clients prefer these kinds of sites to more complex ones; often Brochure Sites require less maintenance because the information is not time-sensitive or Web-specific. Sites such as this can offer a kind of “set it and forget it” sense of accomplishment. Once your site is up, you can check “Get a Web Presence” off your list!
Gabrielle Thodas, DDS, MSD
It's sometimes hard to find companies you trust. White Oak Press and sister company eggsites are run by the same friendly, service-oriented people. Since web design and print work often go hand-in-hand, it makes sense for customers of one company to trust the other with their respective needs.
Gabrielle Thodas is an orthodontist who was a customer of White Oak Press, who specialize in serving doctors and dentists. When she needed a bright, cheerful site to give her potential clients a general overview of her services and existing clients a way to contact her on the web, White Oak turned to eggsites and the result is Orthodas.
Chartier Homes, LLC
Chartier Homes came to us with a supposedly simple request: Change a few lines of text on their website. Unfortunately their designer had created all textual content in an image editing program and uploaded the text as un-editable image files.
We have over eleven years of collective experience with designing, building and maintaining websites. We've pretty much seen it all. Novice web designers (and unfortunately even some “professionals”) often make decisions or mistakes attributed to a lack of experience. Making unmaintainable sites is a good example. We redesigned Chartier's site quickly and efficiently to ensure that the bulk of the textual information on the site was easily editable in clean, well-planned code. We're proud of our prompt maintenance service but we understand that somewhere down the road there is going to be a time when some other designer or developer has to maintain a page we created. We want that person to be able to do so easily, and if that person is you, you're going to thank us for getting you started on the right foot while you learned the ropes of web design.
Chartier was also able to take advantage of our expertise with standard industry design tools as we were able to take a photo of their facility which had not yet completed all repairs, and retouch it to make it appear as flawless as the final result. Being able to deliver products faster than otherwise possible simply by being proficient in our craft is one of the things that makes what we do so rewarding.