Web Designs

Having a well-designed site, that is both easy to use and enjoyable to look at, is crucial to doing business on the Internet. You want to make sure that once people find you, they stay with you, and come back often.

I have designed many sites that try to combine functionality and aesthetics for the benefit of my clients.

Sanibel Accomodations came to me in 1995 for a site to promote their rental condominiums on beautiful Sanibel Island, FL. Having a large German clientele, I decided to create their site in both English and German. Since their site went on-line, they've seen incredible amounts of business generated from their Internet presence, both from overseas customers and customers right here in the United States. Utilizing an email response form allows them to receive detailed information from potential online customers, giving them the ability to collect pertinent information before contacting the client directly about their vacation plans.

Beach Seafood Market is another site from Southwest Florida. Early on, Beach Seafood realized that the future of mail-order business was on the Internet, and by offering overnight delivery of fresh Florida crab, shrimp and lobster, they could be a very popular site. I designed their site to both entice the buyer to make a purchase from anywhere in the United States, and to ease in order processing, using an email form that is processed by an external Perl script on the client machine and then transferred into their daily shipping database. Credit card processing was originally accomplished using the CyberCash system, but the proprietor decided to move to a manual processing system from his offices after receiving a number of bogus credit card orders using stolen cards. This, however, was early on in online transaction processing, and the safeguards against stolen card use are much stronger now.

Cherub Hill is a Victorian-style bed and breakfast located in Minnesota. By offering a web site that gives a small "virtual tour" of their facilities, potential visitors can get a feel for the surroundings that a telephone call cannot accomplish, and by putting the information onto the Internet, rather than a printed brochure, both eliminates printing and mailing costs and allows the information to be dynamically updated to keep up with market trends and changes.

Coupon Express had the idea to open a web site that offered coupons, normally delivered to regional clients by direct mail, on a nationwide basis. Utilizing coupons and advertisements that were already established through their direct mail business, and adapting them to the Web, was accomplished through a QuarkXPress-to-HTML filtering system, originally written by Quark and modified by myself. We also decided to offer a contest to visitors to their site, which made the visitors want to come back to see if they had won the weekly and monthly offerings. This repeat visit situation allowed Coupon Express to have higher hit counts, which increased advertiser interest in the project.

Radion Leisure is a corporation located in Great Britain that specializes in snooker halls, night clubs, health spas, and other leisure-time activities. Their web site is a rather simple design that gives its customers a way to find the locations of their various facilities in an easy-to-use format. Because of the international nature of the Internet, the fact that they are based out of Great Britain presented no problems to me in designing and hosting their site here in the States. This allowed them to take advantage of my reduced pricing structure, compared to having the equivalent work done locally in Great Britain.

Sanibel Goldsmith is a small, custom jeweler in Florida that wanted to be able to display some of their work online, in hopes that people would come across it and commission new pieces from them, or purchase some of their previously designed work. Using high quality scans of photos of the works, then making the background of the photo transparent, allows their work to look exactly as it would be presented to a customer in their store.

Other work I have done include Cold Fusion development, CGI scripting, JavaScript, DHTML, Cascading Style Sheets, Java programming, Active Server pages, ActiveX controls, and graphics work, both static and animated.

For an example of some of this work, please examine my Search Engine Site, which allows users to submit a search to many different popular search engines at once, and combines DHTML positioning, Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript, and custom graphics.