I created the gnoB Socket brand and website for my friends, father’s new venture. He saw a great opportunity in the market with the recent legalization of marijuana in some states and wanted to explore a different field. I proposed a vibrant brand composed of naming, logo design, e-commerce website, PPC campaign, product photography, social media campaign and business cards based on his budget and need to break into the market.
When I started this project I originally created a simple landing page utilizing Shopify’s Buy Button API to sell products. Unfortunately after about 8 months of successful business they were banned for selling “drug paraphernalia” since they are not located in California or a state where marijuana is legal. This prompted me to set up a custom shopping cart interface using wooCommerce and Authorize.Net, as well as finding a high-risk merchant who would allow them to operate. Setting up the new shopping cart system was a breeze and has proven to work even better than the original Shopify system did. I really enjoyed the creative freedom on this project and I’m very happy watching the fan base and sales steadily grow.
About gnoB Socket:
gnoB Socket is the perfect companion for today’s busy lifestyle. No pipes, rolling papers, water buckets, hoses, tubes, apples (yeah, we know…) or other weird contraptions needed. It’s the lifehack for your lifehacks. The On-The-Go Gravity Cap is an innovative and affordable waterfall/gravity bong accessory. It features a dual-bowl design that fits onto standard plastic bottles and aluminum soda cans. gnoB Socket’s discrete profile allows you the freedom to relax, kick back, and indulge after a long day. Or before one.
MotherToBaby was my first project at MAD Group and the project that enabled me to hit the ground running. While the website may not look big from your initial glance there is over 800 pages on just this installation alone. One of the biggest challenges was having to combine two previously existing websites into one, while maintaining a solid user experience so mothers of any age could easily find helpful information on just about any medication or substance around. This is one of the few websites we loaded with a wide variety of modules due to the many pathways a user could embark on. We also built out a variety of landing pages, location based affiliate sites, and translated important parts of the site to spanish. While the website design itself could use a refresh, the usability has proven to work quite well and this site remains one of our most popular websites totalling over 60,000 visits per month.
About MotherToBaby:
MotherToBaby, a service of the non-profit Organization of Teratology Information Specialists (OTIS), is dedicated to providing cutting-edge and up-to-date information about the risks of medications, chemicals, herbal products, illicit drugs, diseases and much more during pregnancy and while breastfeeding. OTIS and its information service, MotherToBaby, are suggested resources by many agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). More than 100,000 women and their health care providers seek information about birth defect prevention from OTIS and MotherToBaby every year.
When ICT reached out to us they were in desperate need of a brand refresh. As a leading importer in the wholesale coffee bean business they clearly knew what they were doing, but needed help conveying that to the public. We created a very vibrant brand for them as we wanted them to stand out like the power players they were. When it came time to develop the site they insisted they wanted a way to display their inventory online. While we typically would shy away from inventory related systems in the past, they already had begun the process of working with a 3rd party company to pull the information into a csv file. From there I started mapping the data to push into wooCommerce product fields and started creating a way to filter and search through the coffee offerings on the front end. Once the offerings were selected they would auto populate a form that sends to ICT, just leaving the user to fill in their contact information. I enjoyed working on this project quite a bit as there was a lot of creative freedom and I always love to overcome technical challenges. ICT is still on retainer with us to this day and have seen massive increases on ROI in their marketing efforts with us.
About Intercontinental Coffee Traders:
ICT is the preeminent specialty importer of the best wholesale green coffee beans on the market. They travel to remote regions of the globe to assess and acquire the highest quality beans, so you can be assured your unique roasting creates exceptional aromas, flavors, and qualities your patrons will look forward to, time and time again. They put passion into every bag and as specialty coffee importers that means that they study and connect with producers to sample their coffees every new crop season and oversee their process at seed-level. They build lasting relationships that are entrenched in an implicit understanding of ICT’s high product expectations.
Before Aqua logic came to us they had a very outdated website created with static html and css. They wanted to take the next step into the digital realm by selling their products online nationally. Previously they let us know they were primarily receiving all their business from word of mouth and industry magazine advertising.
This site was the first e-commerce website that I had personally been a part of. After developing most of the website, we tackled the shopping cart system utilizing wooCommerce. I learned a lot on this project about how e-commerce systems work, tax regulations, laws by state and how to integrate a 3rd party merchant system. Since the launch of the site they immediately jumped up in organic ranking on google, and in turn began to see a huge increase in business. I regularly perform maintenance and speed optimization on their site and have a great relationship with the folks over at Aqua Logic. They are some of my favorite clients and are always telling us how great business has been ever since we launched their website.
About Aqua Logic:
Aqua Logic is the industry leader in aquatic design, manufacturing and integration. They provide precision design and fabrication of high-performance aquatic systems and components all from there local San Diego factory using American made resources.
JVA Art Group was another project that we got to have some fun with when creating their new brand. It was very important for us to try and create a brand and website with a modern yet sophisticated style, while not overshadowing their beautiful art work. When it came time to develop the website – Less, a CSS preprocessor that we integrated into our custom wordpress theme template saved us quite a bit of time. While it typically does, the largest benefit with this brand was the amount of time we were able to take a normal “black text on white background” site and change it to be.. the very opposite. As I progressed styling each section, page by page, I began to develop more of the style we were working so hard to achieve. I broke out of a typical grid based website by overlapping text onto images, adjusting the typography by pairing different font weights with drastic sizes and adding minimal elements of color for additional flair. I had a lot of fun working on this site and it was great to collaborate with other artists in a different field.
About JVA Art Group:
At JVA Art Group, we are devoted to your vision. We understand the challenges and complexities of the custom art world, and how difficult it can be to communicate a vision definitively. Therefore, we commit to close collaboration, strategic processes, and extensive sample collections, to ensure that not only will your art be cherished, but the journey will as well. It is our mission to be an extension of you, to create intellectual art, that connects, delights, inspires, and communicates; and to be your first choice for strategic art design.
Benefit Pro was one of my favorite websites to work on at MAD Group. The owner at Benefit Pro has a wicked eye for micro details, alignment and spacing and he had no problem letting me know. I enjoyed discussing and educating him on usability while he kept me in check and reminded me of our pixel perfect agreement. One of the ways I was able to add some character to the brand was to create a page called the “Benefit Pro-fessor”, which in a similar vein to Geico, was a personal companion that offered a library of resources for your insurance needs. Even though we created the brand and launched the website in 2016 the design elements and UI are so perfectly crafted that the website manages to look like it was just recently done, even by today’s standards.
This website was passed over to me after another developer on the team had to move on to a different project. The theme he installed was called Mystile, and while it did help with some of the heavy lifting, quite a bit of additional functionality and styling needed to be added to keep up with the owners standards. If I had the opportunity to create this site again I would definitely start from scratch using a custom theme with minimal plug-ins as this site was unfortunately hacked a few years later due to outdated plug-ins. Once the owner reached out and I cleaned the malware up off the site and set-up additional security precautions and firewalls, however the site now runs a bit slowly due to the plug-in and theme bloat.
About Benefit Pro:
For over 15 years, Benefit Pro has been helping companies throughout San Diego access, understand, and implement employee benefits and HR support. Their approach is unique and tailored, aligning their solutions with their clients growth strategies. While their services are proudly focused on San Diego, they are recognized and respected on numerous levels nationwide. Benefit Pro’s exceptional performance record is the result of an extraordinary team dedicated to helping companies be their best without blowing their budget.
Lars Remodeling came to us early in 2018 asking us to help boost their online presence and ultimately tap into the digital market in an effort to convert more online users into sales. They had created a very prestigious name for themselves, especially through word of mouth and TV / radio marketing efforts. We lead the project by creating a new website design for them with an emphasis on displaying their beautiful remodeling work in an open format, that almost resembled a journal-esque format. We wanted to convey how personal each project was, display the client involved process and the quality craftsmanship work they are known for. They told us they had the most success converting prospects into clients after inviting them to their remodeling workshop they held twice every month. With this in mind, we crafted the website with an abundance of call-to-actions and routes that would lead the user to sign up for the workshop.
I really enjoyed working with Lars as they constantly would allow us to make edits and revisions to their site to test and see what would work best. With so many workshop updates I ended up creating functionality that would update various parts of the site automatically based on the schedule of their workshops. We also ran various ad campaigns and I learned a lot about the tracking side of digital marketing and google adword campaigns. We ended up almost doubling their workshop submissions on average while lowering their ppc ad spend.
About Lars Remodeling & Design:
Lars is an award-winning home remodeling company that specializes in home renovation projects of all sizes. From a single room update, to a whole house remodel, Lars Remodel & Design can help with all of your San Diego remodeling needs. Lars was started in 1991 and now twenty-eight years later is one of the largest San Diego remodeling companies, still dedicated to maintaining the same values. Lars Remodeling & Design is proud to have received national recognition as one of the best remodeling companies in the US and looks forward to even more years of providing the San Diego community with exceptional home renovation services.
Onramp developed a revolutionary lightweight wireless technology as an answer to the current power grid/utility issues around the world. While the technology was there, they were in desperate need of powerful marketing and a new look. Freshly out of college, I was hired on as a design intern and worked my way up through the marketing department to become a full time web developer & lead designer. I handled most of the marketing material and strategy, developing all the collateral for trade shows, events, presentations, product labels, brochures, and one-sheets etc. I even had the pleasure of designing a surfboard for a few of the higher-ups. I eventually asked if I could update the website to match our recent marketing efforts and they agreed. A few months later we launched the Onramp Wireless site, my first custom theme on the WordPress CMS featuring a custom parallax homepage design and many unique animations that helped illustrate their story and technology, ultimately propelling the user experience.
About Onramp Wireless:
Ingenu (Formerly Onramp Wireless) has forged new paths since its inception; they have innovation at their core backed by the true pioneers of wireless connection. Their depth of technical and industry knowledge is unmatched in the M2M/IoT space. Ingenu has developed RPMA, the Internet of Things’ leading machine-exclusive connectivity solution. RPMA undergirds the Machine Network, the world’s first public network designed exclusively for machines.