Web Site Design, Development & Maintenance
Just a few of the sites I've built over the years:
In most cases, thumbnails and link above it will go to the client's site, unless its gone offline, in which case you will see a screenshot.
Recent Projects
I've been so busy I haven't had time to update this page in a looooong time. Here are a slew of screenshots and links, I'll try and write clever descriptive comments one of these days.
*YPIE.org redesign/complete rebuild, basic look by prior design firm,
still a major project.
NuNet, Inc., a national ISP, was my most recent fulltime day job. I am still their web consultant on a freelance basis. This is I think the 3rd or 4th total site redesign I've done for this client. I can't take credit for the look and feel though, they had a marketing firm make a style guide for all their marketing materials so I based my graphics and html/css coding on a Photoshop mockup they provided. In addition to building sites from scratch, I do touch-up, updates and troubleshooting for their web hosting clients. When fulltime, I did all the above plus registering, setting up and configuring new domains and other related server administration tasks.
This is also I think the 3rd or 4th total site redesign I've done for this client too. Again, I can't take credit for the look and feel though, they had a marketing firm make a style guide for all their marketing materials (seems to be something going around) so I based my graphics and html/css coding on that.
I found out about these guys while getting my play about the Steel (above) together. They aim to collect and preserve the history of the people who made the steel. Sort of what the play itself does. They're having a Historical and Cultural Festival this summer June 11-13, so we got together and they agreed to present the play and I moved the dates up to open during the festival.
Then I volunteered to build them a web site. Right now its mainly a brochure about what they intend to do. An online worker registration and database search is in process, and currently I am adding photos, memorabilia and other materials to the galleries.
"A grassroots effort to preserve Bethlehem’s past while ensuring its economic future," their primary goal is to save the remaining buildings and blast furnaces of the former Bethlehem Steel plant in Bethlehem PA. It was here that the steel for the Golden Gate bridge, the Verrazano Narrows bridge, the Empire State building, countless ships and big guns and armaments for both World Wars, and much, much more was forged by the toil of thousands of workers.
When I found out about this group, I volunteered to take on the task of updating their site and ended up totally redesigning it.
Four generations of my family worked there and I would chain myself to the buildings before I saw them tear it down. Developers had planned on razing the site and possibly putting in a strip mall, like we need another one of those.
Right now the fate of this monument to all the workers who spent their lives in this hell hole and basically built America, is in limbo. No one knows what is going to happen to it.
It is time for action! Visit the site and download and send letters to our government officials so that they know how their constituents want the site used.
Wegmans Great Tastes Culinary Festival 2004
A complete redesign of last year's Culinary Festival site, with completely new navigation and classy new look. Also involved lots of backend database work to handle ticket sales, vendor applications, donations and more.
This local wine and food festival was started by Geoff Whaling and Trisha Hessinger to raise funds for a breast cancer awareness project they created in memory of Trisha's mother Marguerite. Good people making good things happen for a good cause, can't help but get on board with that.
"Have I told you lately – YOU ARE FANTASTIC!!!! I can't thank you enough. The more I look at this site – the more I am impressed – not only with your skill - but how you have been able to capture the quality of our event on this site with every detail. Count me as one of your biggest supporters!"
—Geoff Whaling
Multi-talented media personality Trisha Hessinger needed an update of her web site so her husband, for whom I'm building a site for the 2004 Wegmans Great Tastes Culinary Festival, hired me to give it a look that reflected her successful career as a woman automotive expert and spokesperson, capable yet still feminine.
"Important to Trisha is her hope that her site can be a place of encouragement for women—especially young women who are looking toward the auto industry for a career—and also for women who are looking to be more informed about the working of their automobiles."
—Geoff Whaling
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As a freelancer you never know when you're going to make your next connection to a job. Last summer I was hired (so I thought) to design a site for a youth theatre company. It fell through after I built most of it because of twisted internal political stuff (long story...). Kind of a drag, but a few months later they offered me a role in a play. Although I was ticked because of losing the gig after putting in a lot of unpaid hours, I said what the heck, things were slow and I needed to get out of the house. Turned out I had a blast and during one of the shows, I struck up a brief chat with one of the moms who was ushering. Her husband owned a construction company and wanted a web site. "Do you have a card?" she said. You betcha! and thus the karmic forces came into balance once again.
Humongous shopping mall web site for NuNet, Inc. Pretty much all hand-coded. Hours and hours of tedious data entry thru an online interface to add 1000s of items. All code for page templates had to be entered in the same way.
www.nni.com/propel
Spiffy sub-site to promo new dial-up accelerator offered by NuNet, Inc., a national ISP and longtime great client.
The city of Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, really liked the sites I did for NJAllied.com and InlineData.com so they hired me to design a clean and classy new look for their official government site. I revamped the navigation and reorganized this extensive and information-filled site to make it easier to find stuff.
Redesign of old, very funky site for Worlds Largest Auto Parts Recycler (aka "junkyard").
www.hipchixjewelry.com
Hip design for jewelry and accessories designers right here in Bethlehem PA. They just happen to have the license to design the merchandise for the CBS TV show Survivor.
Complete redesign of a huge site for a volunteer fire company to the south of me. They plan on having me create all kinds of neat interactive and educational stuff too. I can hardly wait!
This was a huge, complicated, database-integrated site all written in ASP. I did a complete redesign of the entire site and lots of behind the scenes programming stuff too. Whew, very hard work, but fun and I feel like a real geek now! Since sold to someone else and redone pretty much. Click the thumbnail for a screenshot of what it looked like when I finished it.
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No relation to the coffee mega-franchise, Beth Starbuck and her husband, Steve Goldner, make hand-crafted one-of-kind ceramic tiles for all kinds of things.
PrimeTech Training
The owner of this techie training school up in Lehighton, PA contacted me after visiting this site and being impressed with my clean professional designs and my quirky humor. I drove up there, we talked, he hired me, by the next day he had most of this site online. He's stoked, who's next? YOU?
New Life Enterprises (screenshot, now offline)
After visiting tons of web sites of other web designers, Sue Ringer contacted me and asked me to build a site for her new business. I was very flattered. Her business is providing consultation services re. image and resume presentation for folks going through the gut-wrenching process of applying for a job in the corporate world. It was extremely important that we find the right blend of professionalism and comfort/approachability to both impress prospective clients with her knowledge of that world and to introduce her as a friendly person to work with. I'll let her describe the results:
"The site looks fantastic! I love it, you are the best - it's dynamic, catchy and non-intimidating. Exactly what I wanted...This is why I hired you. I've honestly not seen websites like yours!"
— Sue Ringer
Since building this site, Sue has gone on to become a real estate agent and asked me to build her a web page.
(Original site is now offline, I present it here solely for purposes of representing my work. Content is not intended to represent the current services of the client)
This very stylish corporate site presents the services of the multi-billion dollar partnership of three multi-billion dollar corporations which together expedite the development of large industrial storage and shipping complexes. Maybe I should have charged more?
Rob Leder is the marketing guy who hired me to build the Team First site. Then asked me to build his.
and now we pause for a brief message from our sponsors...
(psst, if you order your web hosting from them, they send me some money ;-)
PoliceCarVideo.com
Same client as NJ Allied above. Same process as described. He knew exactly what he wanted and I helped him get it.
A site for Santa Barbara Realtor, Carolynn Loeppke, rebuilt and redesigned again for 2002. My first commercial client still with me after 6 years! Thanks, Carolynn!
This quick makeover of a small site demonstrates how a sharp graphical eye and keen sense of style combined with thorough in-depth knowledge of CSS and HTML can turn even the ugliest of homebrewed ducklings into a slick, corporate swan.
Site for architectural recycler and restorer Ken Muth & Co. I really love what this guy does, he saves old barns, log cabins and houses and all the parts thereof.
This beautifully restored inn is the oldest operating inn in the country. George Washington slept here. Really! So did many other key personalities of the American Revolution. I donated my time on this one to follow in the tradition established by my grandmother who was one of the instrumental leaders of the group which restored the inn to its former glory.
David Michael Frantz Landscapes
The first site I ever built for my brother many years ago. I recently did a quick re-design and I'm awaiting more new pictures and updated information.
Credit Union Web Sites
This is I think the 3rd or 4th total site redesign I've done for this client. I can't take credit for the look and feel tho, they had a marketing firm make a style guide for all their marketing materials so I based my html/css coding on that.
Although originally designed with a simple FP theme so an in house staff person could update it, I do the updates now.
Here are just a few of the 20+ sites I was involved in developing when I was employed at a credit union marketing firm in Bethlehem, PA. I don't maintain them any more, and they all have changed, so I removed the links.
(screenshot)
- Atlantic City Electric Company EFCU
- Wilkes-Barre VA Employees FCU
- Local 1360 FCU
- NJ Suburban FCU
- Carter-Wallace FCU
- American Community FCU
- Mon/Marine FCU
- Avon Products Employees FCU
- Woburn Municipal FCU
- Jack Adamo Online
- AmeriChoice FCU - custom e-services section
- Garden State FCU
- IBM Metro Employees FCU
- Apex Federal Credit Union
- Tri-Point FCU
- Princeton University FCU
- Synergy One FCU
- New Cumberland FCU
- US Postal Service FCU
Here's a cool design I made for fun and to show off some fancy custom coding and graphics
Your New Site
Stunned and amazed by my skills and tickled by my wry wit, you decide you must have me do your new web site and contact me immediately, offering me huge amounts of cold hard cash to create whatever my heart desires.
Win Some, Lose Some Dept.
Sometimes you work your butt off on a design, then for some reason or other, the client gives the job to someone else, or just doesn't follow through to launch it. It a drag, especially when it has nothing to do with the quality of your work or their reaction to it, but that's life.
Check out these cool sites!
My Other Sites & Stuff
My personal web site for friends, family, curious passerby and voyeurs. Pictures of me, my animals, and life down on the farm as well as some musings on this and that.
My fonts became so popular I built them a site all their own. I just streamlined it and made it more modern and clean. The older wilder and more colorful versions are still there too, one with invisible frames, one without. Stop by and download some fonts. Please let me know if you use them somewhere so I can drop by and see my work immortalized. If you're going to use them to make a lot of money off a rich client, it'd be really cool if you sent me some. Thanks.
My father wrote a brilliant one man play for me to perform about what life was like in the steel mill where he worked for 11 years in the 50s-60s. I'm performed it in Bethlehem, Pa. in June 2004 just across the river from where the actual 28" mill once stood, before the company went bankrupt. The play is a tribute to all the steelworkers who gave their lives to build America and now are basically screwed.
I built a web site for my alumni class at the Hill School. Then other classes started to ask me to build them web sites. Another subdivision business is born.
I was also asked to build a site for the Hockey alumni of the Hill School. I thought why not build one for my own favorite sport and try and get all the Hill surfers to start social networking. Web 2.0!
Hosted by my beloved Lab/Border Collie mix, Lulu. I built lots of the parts of this site over time just for fun and to learn new techniques and later repurposed it to be a site for credit union kids which we planned to market as a subscription site to CUs. Its sort of in limbo right now, but full of fun silly stuff.
Happy Hollow Arts & Crafts
(coming soon, ok, well, one of these days anyway)
I salvaged lots of beautifully weathered wood from my barn during the restoration. Pine, Hemlock, Fir, Cedar, Oak and even the prized and now mostly extinct American Chestnut. I've been making picture frames and other little craft items when time allows and will soon be marketing them online.
Cafe Press Stores - Buy My Way Cool Stuff!
Now you can be Way Cool too! Wear our mascot on your chest! and on other stuff too. Visit the deFaced Fonts store too.
Synergistic Designs
is a top web design firm in the
Allentown, Pennsylvania Web Design
guide on DigitalSpinner.com.
For Great & Cheap Web Hosting I Recommend
For Great & Cheap Web Hosting I Recommend
