From the category archives:

Design

New White House Website Launched!

January 20, 2009

in Design

The new White House website is beautiful.

Until a more in-depth analysis of the website is available, here are some screenshots and images.  Read my White House website’s design predictions, and subscribe to my RSS feed to keep updated!

New White House Website  Read more&hellip

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Obama White House Website Design — the President's Web Site

January 6, 2009

in Design

Update: the new White House Website is launched!

Presidential White House Web Design...Change sure IS a'comin!

The new White House website design: what to expect?

We know who President-Elect Barack Obama’s web designers were: SimpleScott, and later Walker Hamilton too.  My sources tell me (don’t you have sources? :-) ) that Scott Thomas and Walker Hamilton are no longer working with the Obama or Change.gov website. Scott Thomas is busy working on an art collective project (VERY cool stuff).

Change.gov web design

The Change.gov site is basically BarackObama.com restyled a bit. The Change.gov site uses many resources from the barackobama.com website, including most of the main CSS file. The Change.gov website was designed by Matt Ipcar. The Change.gov website’s back-end (just like the Obama website) is being handled by Blue State Digital.

What can we learn about the WhiteHouse.gov web design?

If the Change.gov web site is any indication, we can extrapolate the following:  Read more&hellip

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Creating a Real Estate Website in WordPress — Part 2

June 18, 2008

in Code, Design, Tutorial

Real estate website screenshot

If you find this article helpful, please share it, or Digg it!

In Part 1 of Building a real estate website in Wordpress, you learned about a plugin called FreshPost that we used to set up the basic structure of your real estate website.  Using this article, you will be able to display a single listing page that has all the content your real estate website will need.  Read more&hellip

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Westside Business Builders chooses Katz Web Design

May 16, 2008

in Design, KWS, SEO

Westside Business Builders logo

Westside Business Builders is a networking group based in Golden, Colorado. Their website provides general information about the group, and it serves as a member directory. Katz Web Design is a member of the group.

The membership committee asked Katz Web Design to prepare a proposal for the WSBB website, and this Wednesday, the group voted to have KWD redesign the website to improve appearance and functionality.  Read more&hellip

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Building a Real Estate Website in WordPress – Part 1

April 22, 2008

I am designing and creating a real estate website with WordPress, and I’m going to be writing a few articles that detail how it’s done.  This article will get you started — please leave feedback with any questions or topic requests for the next installment. Real estate using Wordpress Part 2 is now available!

A little background — why use WordPress?

I’m working with a Denver company on a real estate website. Their goal is to showcase their listings in an easy-to-update CMS.

I’ve worked with Open-Realty, and — to say it bluntly — it’s a huge pain in the ass.  When you scratch the surface of OR, you begin to realize how cobbled together it is. Customizing the code to work as it should requires a steep learning curve.  The templates are relatively simple to work with, but the administration section is horrible.  The Open Realty user experience is just awful. 

WordPress is my CMS of choice currently, and it’s so easy to develop for that I recommend it to many of my clients.  Read more&hellip

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Found: Hillary Clinton's web designer

April 15, 2008

Mayfield Strategy Group
We know who Barack Obama’s web designer is.  Let’s find out who Hillary’s web designer is!

I’ve looked through the CSS and there’s no trace of the designer. Anyone know?

Hillary Clinton’s web designer has been found!

Thanks to krs who left a comment below, Hillary’s web designer has been found.

A company of few words

The only content on Mayfield’s website is this:

The Mayfield Strategy Group is a leading provider of strategic internet services for political campaigns, non-profit organizations, and corporations. Our unique experience and methodology allow us to provide the highest quality and most professional services in the industry.  Read more&hellip

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Found: Barack Obama's Web Designer

April 10, 2008

Update: The New WhiteHouse.gov Website

Update: Who will be the White House web designer?

A lot of people have wanted to know who designed Barack Obama’s website. With good reason: Obama’s website is beautiful. It even conveys Obama’s message of hope in it’s wistful design. Well, here it is:

Barack Obama’s web designer is:

SimpleScott. SimpleScott designed Barack Obama’s website, so here’s to SimpleScott for a gorgeous design.

From Scott Thomas, of SimpleScott:

I am the creative director of New Media for Obama for America. The team consisted of many people in house as well as many volunteers. Project leads were myself and John Slabyk. We are maintaining site and brand in-house. Sol Sender designed the logo before I joined the campaign.  Read more&hellip

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How does a 30% conversion rate sound?

March 25, 2008

I like to brag every now and then.

Landing page conversionWhen we set out to design a landing page for my Denver client, we had our eyes set on a minimum 2% conversion rate for their pay-per-click campaign. Currently, we’re achieving a 15.94% overall conversion rate. I made some tweaks to the form design last week, and for the past 6 days, the landing page is getting a 30% conversion rate (that’s pretty good :-) )  Read more&hellip

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Warning: Create your website at your own risk!

March 17, 2008

Diving too deep can result in a waste of energy, time, and resources.

We know better now.

My wife and I have just bought our first house. It has been updated, it looks great, and we’re slowly making it our own. When we bought it, we planned on installing our own laminate flooring. We bought a circular saw, read a few how-to articles, and felt generally pretty confident. It can’t be that hard!

Each day after work, my wife and I would come to our new house to work on the floors. We started in the small room to get a handle on the process. To make a long (and painful) story short, 8 hours in, we had only completed about 30 square feet. It was a disaster.

By doing flooring ourselves, we managed to:

  • Turn our new house into a source of frustration
  • Spend valuable energy
  • Waste three nights of our lives
  • Burn ourselves out

In the end, we hired a professional. Now the project is done, and it looks great.  Read more&hellip

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