Blog: March 2006

New Colors at ST Mortgage Lending

March 28, 2006

When Susie and I bought our first house, we were really thrilled to find a knowledgeable, friendly, and—this is the important one—really great deal-finding mortgage lender.

Then, when we launched Hop Studios, Sandra Tuperins, owner of ST Mortgage Lending became one of our first clients.

We do regular maintenance work on their site now, and just recently we redid their Web site’s palette.

It’s really not that big a design modification, but I wanted the chance to point them out and thank them for being such a help to us when we needed a place to live. ST Mortgage has since helped several of our friends find good mortgages, too… I better stop, before I start to sound like those emails…

Posted by Travis Smith at 1:37 AM | Comments (0)

Mäni’s Bakery Café Relaunches

March 24, 2006

Sweet! And tasty. That’s how we like our clients.

Mäni’s Bakery Café was a wonderful opportunity for us to develop the Web site of a food-related company. Susie and I both love good food, and Mäni’s Bakery Café is a well loved Los Angeles institution since 1989—as you can see by the comments on their blog. They make pastries, breads and other yummies, baked from natural, less-refined ingredients, and they run a restaurant as well.

Mäni’s had been doing some excellent online outreach and marketing; they’d started a blog on Typepad, they had a mailing list, and had a variety of services they offered online. Hop Studios came in to unify all these efforts under a clean, singular look and feel.

Mäni’s has a few particular issues that made the project a challenge. One was the international characters in the site name—this proved to be a real challenge, especially across their content management system and the RSS feeds they produce.

Also they have a very particular style, and they wanted to use their logo’s font throughout the site, including in the navigation and blog titles. We still wanted them to be able to produce and change these items quickly, so we implemented a system called sIFR, with sIFR, CSS, JavaScript and Flash, you create dynamic Flash headlines that are controlled by the site’s style sheets, and still display just perfectly if the user doesn’t have Flash. They print well, too. sIFR was in no way simple, but the results… well, take a look.

The entire system is run with Expression Engine, including the menu, and the page-top rotating photos. In fact, if you’re an administrator, and you visit the menu, you have dynamic editing links right there, making this site very unlikely to suffer from the dreaded “out-of-date-menu” disease that many restaurant sites have. It has a site search, so it’s easy to find any particular item or blog entry.

Oh, and the location page uses Google Maps. I think that’s prety snazzy.

Update: Susie reminds me that I should definitely give credit, and wonderful praise, to Denise Wakeman of Next Level Partnership who was the hands-on co-ordinator and blog / marketing strategist that helped Mäni’s through the process. Consider her praised! She made the process enjoyable and organized.

Posted by Travis Smith at 1:32 AM | Comments (0)

Promare Surfaces

March 12, 2006

Do you like marine research and exploration ? I know—who doesn’t?

That’s why Promare was such a fun site for us to design. Promare is a non-profit organization that’s developing advanced research submarines, exploring shipwrecks off the Aegean coast, and generally advancing “man’s knowledge of history and science and to reinvigorate underwater exploration through fusion of popular media and scholarly research.”

If you visit only one page, visit the projects section, which shows you their projects, everything from WWII aircraft to the Thermopylae to the Shuttle Columbia Recovery effort.

The site is extremely simple; it’s basic HTML pages and very light CSS that help format the site, which means it can be produced even when there’s no Internet access—this is important when you might be in the middle of any one of the seven seas. The design leaves plenty of room for future expansion, as the continue to increase the projects they’ve done and the information they share.

Posted by Travis Smith at 1:30 AM | Comments (0)

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