One of my very favorite plant nurseries in the Portland area is Xera Plants. They’ve had a web presence for a very long time, but it was difficult to manage and not easily navigable. So we did a ground-up rebuild in WordPress, where the focus of the site is on the extensive catalog of plants… Continue reading Xera Plants, Inc.
Author: susan
Tobey Nelson Events + Design
All the way up on Whidbey Island there’s this absolute genius of a floral designer named Tobey Nelson. Formerly Vases Wild, Tobey changed her business name in 2016 to user her own name and better reflect that she’s also a top-notch event designer and wedding planner. As part of a rebranding effort, Tobey worked with… Continue reading Tobey Nelson Events + Design
Dairy Hill Ice Cream
A delicious project! A brand-new business with no pre-existing website, Dairy Hill had secured some really charming branding and design assets so we used those to build the site. Since visuals involving ice cream, cake, and other related sweets are integral to the site, each page features an optional hero image with optional overlay box containing… Continue reading Dairy Hill Ice Cream
Diana Sanabria
Diana Sanabria is her name, and the name of her clothing boutique. And she’s an amazing designer with an eye for the truly unique in clothing design, which sets her apart from the gaggle of clothing shops in the wine country town of Healdsburg, California. In preparation for an expansion of product offerings including clothing… Continue reading Diana Sanabria
Lisa Onstad
Lisa’s old website was beautiful online home for her artwork, designed several years ago by our colleague Julia Stoops. But eventually, Lisa found that her own creative output had outgrown the website. She needed a new site design and portfolio architecture that would be able to grow with her, in whatever direction her work takes. The… Continue reading Lisa Onstad
Oregon Podiatric Medical Association
A chapter of the national American Podiatric Medical Association, OPMA is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to serving and protecting the public’s foot health and protecting, promoting and advancing the professional practice of podiatric medicine and surgery through regulatory and legislative channels in Oregon. The podiatrists at Portland’s Westside Foot & Ankle kindly allowed OPMA… Continue reading Oregon Podiatric Medical Association
Cadillac Meter
Central Station Steam Company has been manufacturing the Cadillac® Meter since 1906. In 2015, we gave the company’s website a facelift, and did some significant content and navigation restructuring to eliminate redundancy and confusion. We think the result is a much more readable and engaging site – and that can be challenging to achieve with… Continue reading Cadillac Meter
Floral Sunshine
A redesign for Floral Sunshine gave it a much more modern feel, with better image gallery organization, filtering, and manageability. Includes WooCommerce for ordering of everyday floral arrangements. View the site here.
Alberta Cooperative Grocery
We collaborated with the folks at Alberta Co-op to create a new site, with much more flexibility than their previous site, and better presentation of recipes, a new product search page (user can enter a text string or a SKU number), and some fun design elements that fit with a new branding package they’re working toward… Continue reading Alberta Cooperative Grocery
MRG Foundation
MRG’s mission is to inspire people to work together for justice and mobilize resources for Oregon communities as they build collective power to change the world. And we’ve been at it since 1976. OMG they’re as old as me! Seriously, though, working on this project was a thrill. They have a robust yet complex CRM… Continue reading MRG Foundation
Tessa Brinckman
Way back in 2003 or so, Tessa and I played together in the Astoria Festival Orchestra – it was my very first real orchestra gig and I had a great time playing 2nd flute while Tessa played principal in our little classical period orchestra. We played Mozart’s 25th symphony (I think?) and various other pieces.… Continue reading Tessa Brinckman
Owens, Sneller, Pinzelik, Wood & Schaff, P.C.
This was a really fun project and a great group of folks to work with. Their old site was tired and dated, and really expensive to maintain, so we gave them an overhaul in WordPress with a bold and unusual color scheme, a modern feel, and a site that they can easily maintain themselves.… Continue reading Owens, Sneller, Pinzelik, Wood & Schaff, P.C.
Pizzicato
In conjunction with some print design refreshing that accompanied Pizzicato’s 25th anniversary last fall, they got a whole new website to go along with the refreshed brand colors and style. One of the biggest challenges was to clarify the distinction between catering and home delivery of pizza; a long-term view of analytics data from the… Continue reading Pizzicato
Guardian Games
Guardian Games is the biggest, nerdiest, awesomest gaming paradise around. Design by Caitlin Loos of Yespertise, development by Collage Creative. Lots of fun features to this site. I especially love the game logo ticker in the footer – so geeky!
The People’s Yoga – redesign for 2015
The new year brought a brand-new site for TPY, designed by the brilliant Joanna Papaleo, who we worked with a few years back when she designed their original site, which we also built. This new site is fresh, modern, responsive, and filled with gorgeous photos of the lovely folks in the PY community. We’re stoked! Go check… Continue reading The People’s Yoga – redesign for 2015
Clowns Without Borders USA
I am deeply proud of this site, and likewise all the members of this wonderful humanitarian aid organization who work incredibly hard. These tireless clowns are relentless in their ongoing pursuit to bring psychosocial relief to people all over the world whose lives are challenged in one way or another. It has been a great… Continue reading Clowns Without Borders USA
Vases Wild
This design grew out of a business card, and it ended up turning into one of the more beautiful sites I’ve had the pleasure of working on. Featuring a Google-image-search-results type grid to display examples of Tobey’s work. It’s super easy for her to keep updated and she loves that part. Here’s the site.
J Gary Mitchell Film Company
Designed by Jennifer Reynolds, this site has a wonderful feel that is just enough “kids” and just enough “serious” – an important balance to strike with this very critical work that Gary Mitchell is doing. The site features the popular WooCommerce e-commerce plugin to allow for online purchases of Gary’s many award-winning films. See it… Continue reading J Gary Mitchell Film Company
Bennett Hartman Morris & Kaplan
We had a great time working with the very fun bunch of folks at Bennett Hartman. We did an overhaul of their site using WordPress, which included a refreshed and modernized design that is still relevant to their existing logo, site structure/IA improvements, better navigation, and copy writing for a more consistent voice that, in… Continue reading Bennett Hartman Morris & Kaplan
Elders in Action
Yet another great non-profit organization that was really fun to find out about while we worked on the project! They do great work. This was a collaboration with Julia of Blue Mouse Monkey, who handled visual design and IA. When they came to us, EIA had a bit of a mess – their site was… Continue reading Elders in Action
Lovejoy Bakers
Lovejoy got a much-needed total overhaul: new completely custom WordPress theme with a fresh look and feel (fully responsive), a new e-commerce section of their site, and a stunning collection of gorgeous photos displayed prominently. Designed in collaboration with their in-house art director, we focused heavily on making this as user-friendly and intuitive as possible… Continue reading Lovejoy Bakers
Abigail Marble, Illustrator
Abbey had a flash site that was hard to update and invisible in mobile Apple devices – a real problem for someone whose work is often viewed by iPad-wielding art directors! We fixed that for her with a sleek new WordPress site that leverages the native WordPress galleries as well as Jetpack for the carousel.… Continue reading Abigail Marble, Illustrator
Institute for Exceptional Growth Companies
Another one of Julia’s very satisfying designs, IEGC’s site is actually just static HTML – no content management system. It felt like a real “retro” experience for me to hand-write all 5 or 6 pages of the site and I really quite enjoyed it, believe it or not! One thing that’s really fun for all… Continue reading Institute for Exceptional Growth Companies
ActivateHub
The WordPress site is the front-end “face” of the ActivateHub events aggregator calendar, a creation of Lindsay Caron, who is one of the most dynamic and energetic people we know! She came to us with a sort-of-okayish site, but it was nearly impossible for her to update the site herself (like, what’s the point of… Continue reading ActivateHub
Westside Foot and Ankle
Design by Caitlin Loos of Yespertise. We developed a custom WordPress theme and created an interactive foot diagram in HTML5 (props to Chad Kula for that part!), which is editable from entirely within the WordPress dashboard/admin area. Home page: Interactive Foot Diagram:
Blue Mouse Monkey
Our dear colleague Julia gave her own site a fresh look early in 2014. Don’t let all these business names confuse you — we’re all collaborators/colleagues/co-conspirators and we just love working together. This site was fun to do because Julia and I really got to collaborate on it – especially when it came to the… Continue reading Blue Mouse Monkey
Gray Family Foundation
This was an amazing project, a beautiful site designed by Julia of Blue Mouse Monkey, which makes for a very rewarding development project. This involved several custom post types, a custom plugin, some really cool widgets, a searchable directory of past grants, a board members’ only area, and some very satisfying automation and re-use of… Continue reading Gray Family Foundation
Council For Advancing Diabetes Care
CADC’s site, as of this posting, is still not live due to circumstances beyond our control. So we can only show you a screenshot. Design by the most talented Julia Stoops of Blue Mouse Monkey. Development by Collage Creative.
Oregon First
Visual design and IA by Julia Stoops of Blue Mouse Monkey. We handled project management and development. The challenge was to bring together Julia’s beautiful design vision and the technical limitations of a predetermined software solution, chosen by Oregon First, to handle the integration of RMLS data. Site features multiple property search functions, a searchable… Continue reading Oregon First
Ashia & the Bison Rouge
Internationally acclaimed songstress and cellist Ashia Grzesik needed a whole-site overhaul to support her new album, and at the same time make it easier for her to manage her content. She had an aging WordPress site in place already, but it was hard to post new show dates, difficult to use the site in mobile… Continue reading Ashia & the Bison Rouge
American Steel Studios
AmSteel got a major back-end overhaul of their WordPress site, including a new and more functional theme, to allow them to better utilize the content management system. We streamlined everything, added a tenant directory, and improved nearly every part of their administration experience, saving them hundreds of hours of hair-pulling and hand-wringing. We also added… Continue reading American Steel Studios
Sal’s Kitchen
Sal’s had a very boring site, with precious few photos – you’d never know how gorgeous their dishes really are! We used jQuery for a fullscreen background slideshow, and made it so that the folks at Sal’s merely have to tick a box to include or exclude photos from the background set. Easy site management… Continue reading Sal’s Kitchen
The Bridal Loft
This was a back-end updating and UX-improvement project. We didn’t change the design of the site, except to make it responsive where it was fixed-width previously, but we revamped the WordPress theme, better integrated the blog with the rest of the site, cleaned up a lot of unfinished business and updated everything to the most… Continue reading The Bridal Loft
Groundation Foundation
Groundation Foundation is a non-profit coalition in Oakland, California that promotes living walls and related. As a startup they needed a quick and simple site to promote and support their mission. Live site here.
Marger Johnson & McCollum
The folks at MJM wanted out from under a proprietary CMS they’d been using for several years, but they loved their site’s design and functionality, which was built in Flash using quite a lot of animated elements. We converted it to WordPress for them, making it significantly easier to manage the content, allowing it to… Continue reading Marger Johnson & McCollum
Collage Music
Susan’s other occupation is being a musician! This was a huge UX challenge. We wanted to give Collage Music’s clients (usually brides who are not musicians) the clearest possible picture of the entire process of hiring live musicians, what the various instrumental combinations are, and how they sound as compared to each other, and more.… Continue reading Collage Music
American Clothing Experiment
The Experiment, as it is affectionately known, is a nonprofit that uses just about every available channel to make the world a better place. It may not look like there’s much going on at times, but that’s never actually the case. While e-commerce is not currently part of this organization, it was once, and we… Continue reading American Clothing Experiment
Susie & the Sidecars
A midcentury feel was in order for this band’s website, so we re-created a formica pattern for the background. The site also features a gig calendar and a band-members-only page for sharing recordings and notes.
The People’s Yoga
Visual design by Joanna Papaleo; development included careful consideration of UX for site admins and integration with MindBody API for class and workshop scheduling. Live site here.
Jo Hamilton Art
Jo had a design she loved but no content management system, so she was reliant on a developer to update her portfolio. In 2010 she started creating new work at a fast pace and couldn’t afford to wait around to get her new works posted. So we set her up with WordPress and integrated Zenfolio… Continue reading Jo Hamilton Art