Web Design
At BrettRoby.com, I offer web design as my primary service. I've designed a number of sites from scratch on my own in under one year's time. I've got a fantastic handle on HTML and CSS languages — so much so that I write my websites and individual web pages from hand. Every once in a while, I'll use Adobe Dreamweaver to write a page or check my syntax, but by and large I write it all by hand. I also try to create all graphics by hand; usually I use Adobe Photoshop CS3 or Illustrator CS3 (or some combination of the two).
Below are a few recent examples of some of my works
Max Muscle Santa Cruz
This was the very first client for whom I designed a website. Before me, all they had was a myspace page. I was getting an energy drink one day at the store, when I asked the owner if he'd ever considered "getting serious" about his online marketing. I told him a longer version of what I've got on my homepage — that the Yellow Pages are more or less passé these days — and that it was time to step up his game. He instantly agreed and hired me on the spot. I remember his exact words: "let's do this. When do we start?"
Over the next several weeks and months, they went from having no Internet presence, to having an official, rockin', website with a host of other tools not previously known to them. I set them up with digital.forest.net, my favorite webhost provider, suggested an appropriate domain name and registered it with GoDaddy, and showed them how to use e-mail in general. I also designed their company letterhead, taught them how to use mass e-mailings by setting up e-mail groups — I even designed an e-flier template that they use for their monthly mailers, which they are still using to this day. Their Internet presence has increased their business by a significant amount.
Their site features several functional properties. They've got an online gallery of products for sale at their physical location, several image galleries, some flash animation, a blog, a few services provided with PayPal payment buttons, and even an automated and secure, contact form. All of this was set up by me as part of my web design package. Check out the official Max Muscle Santa Cruz website and have a look around. Owners Geff and Sarah wrote me a great testimonial, which you can read by visiting my testimonials gallery.
Santa Cruz Radio and Television
Santa Cruz Radio and Television (commonly called "SCTV" for short) is a local shop owned by a family very close to me. Early in 2008, I had discussed with the owners of SCTV what they were doing for their online marketing. Turns out, at the time they had a very simple homepage, but a homepage only. The homepage was made out of one large (and somewhat convoluted) hyper text markup language (HTML) table, which is a big no-no in today's web design. No offense to Greg of SCTV — and he knows this — but we had to get that changed...quickly! I took the visual look and feel of the original table, and recreated it with a cascading style sheet (CSS) and overlaying HTML documents. To an end-user, the site looks identical to the way it did before my CSS and HTML overhaul, but to a programmer or their website supporter (i.e. me), I made life a lot easier for future updates and maintaining the style throughout the site.
In some senses, this was one of my harder projects to get started due to the fact that I was trying to match the look of an existing page that was done in a totally different style. Usually I design my sites with a look in my head, then build the CSS and HTML from that. So this was basically a backwards design.
Their homepage had links and some pictures, but the links didn't go anywhere and the site wasn't truly functional, per se. I took the site and not only expanded it so that you could navigate beyond the homepage, but I actually made and implemented many suggestions and functions that may have been overlooked otherwise. Of course all the while utilizing the CSS and HTML as mentioned earlier. If you have a look at Santa Cruz Radio and Television's website, you will see my CSS and HTML in action. Keep in mind that the "look" of the site wasn't my concept, because they had an original layout that I simply built upon, but the functionality was pretty much all me. This site features image galleries, contact information page with an embedded Google map (which is always in real-time), and several nifty applications.