Revolution Healing and Martial Arts LLC was formerly known as Breathe Radiance and was located in Marquette, Michigan before relocating to Appleton, Wisconsin. Parnee has expanded her existing services of massage therapy and breath work to include an herbal sanctuary and martial arts classes.

I designed a web site for Breathe Radiance last year, but with the relocation and re-branding of the business, a completely new one was necessary. The name Revolution Healing and Martial Arts LLC comes from a quote by the founder of Cuong Nhu, O’Sensei Ngo Dong. He said, “Start the revolution within yourself,” and Parnee took that to heart.

The new site is dark, minimalist and modern. To brighten it up a little, I designed a custom graphic that resembles a super nova, or maybe the inside of an atom. This is meant to highlight the micro-macro connection between the energy of the atoms within us all, and ancient stars exploding in space.

The site features a drop-down navigation menu, a quote bubble on right side, and subtle background texture.

The content isn’t all there yet, but it’s getting close. The site is being maintained by Parnee at Revolution Healing and Martial Arts LLC and should have some photos and more information on offerings soon.

Check out revolutionhealingarts.com to see the web site for yourself.

The Cedar Tree Institute is a non­profit orga­ni­za­tion that ini­ti­ates and pro­vides col­lab­o­ra­tive ser­vices in the areas of men­tal health, reli­gion and the environment. Years ago, I designed the original cedartreeinstitute.org and have been tending to it ever since. A completely new design was launched today. It features a horizontal drop-down menu for better navigability, a blog format with widgetized sidebar area, internal search functionality, and a new color scheme with mostly subtle colors and shades of gray. The idea was to match the look of the printed newsletter Ecotone, while making it easier for users to find the content they’re looking for.

New Design

Several years have passed since any major updates have been made to the Cedar Tree Institute’s web site. The first design was done in 2002 and underwent many small, evolutionary changes over the next five or six years.

Sometime near the end of 2007, a new design was rolled out. It featured an image rotator in the header and large rounded corners. It was, however, still based on the previous design and integrated older elements such as the background pattern and general layout.

Previous Design

The newest design offers a complete break from all the old designs and a fresh take on one of the most active non profits in northern Michigan.

While fully functional, there are a few more things I’d like to do in the near future. First, I’ll separate the home, about, and contact links from the main menu and combine them into a different menu located at the top of the page. This will enhance visual comprehension of the main menu. Second, I’ll add some customized stuff to the sidebar. Third, I’ll add a large image slider on the main page and possibly add multiple loops to show recent posts in several different categories. But until then…

Check out cedartreeinstitute.org to see the web site for yourself.

Although Anthony & Co., Inc. has been producing advertising specialty items for over fifty years, I’ve only been designing their web site for twelve. The last major update was done about three years ago, so I was glad to get a chance to redesign basically from scratch. The idea here was to create a simple, modern design that matched the look of existing brochures.

This web site was designed with PHP in order to utilize some of it’s advance features. A modular design was implemented to reduce redundancy. So, any element of the design that is repeated on multiple pages was written in a separate file that is added dynamically when the page loads. Also, the date in the copyright section of the footer automatically updates on the first of every year.

I used some CSS trickery to add some nice features. For instance, the main navigation bar knows what page is currently loaded and styles the corresponding link to let the visitor know what page they’re on. These particular links are also made non clickable since they lead to the same place. This should help to reduce confusion for the user.

Speaking of which, I wanted to make navigation very easy and intuitive. The product pages have a sub-navigation section with links to all product pages so all the products can be reached easily. These links, like the main navigation, behave differently depending on which page is loaded.

Each product page has a reminder about artwork specifications running vertically along the left edge. When clicked, the general information page is loaded. Also, to save the users from extensive scrolling, a “Back to Top” link was added to the lower right hand corner of all product pages.

Another cool feature is located on the main product page. Images of the products are laid out in a thumbnail gallery. Using CSS sprites and the JavaScript library JQuery, I added an animated hover effect that turns the image to gray scale and fades in a dark inner glow.

Check out anthonyco.com to see the web site for yourself.

Wow, it’s been almost two years since the last major site redesign here at Middle Ear Media. A lot has happened since then. It might take a couple days to get everything in order, but I just couldn’t wait any longer.

I went with a whole new look for the site, but I plan on bringing the old look back with an Optional-Theme button where the user can select which Theme is used to display the site.

For the new site, I’m using WordPress as the CMS. I designed a custom WordPress Theme for Middle EAR Media that makes use of many built-in features of WordPress. You can now conduct a search of the entire site, subscribe via RSS or email, leave comments, and much more.

As you can see, the new site has a blog section where I’ll be posting all kinds of stuff related to the projects I’m working on as well as web design in general. So hang tight while I work out the kinks and check back soon.