Here are a few case-studies of our online website projects – the good, the bad, and the ugly. Some of these site projects go back into the mid-90′s when programs like Dreamweaver weren’t even around and Flash described an activity that could get you arrested.

These days our goal isn’t to build sites with fancy bells and whistles (if you want that, there are hundreds of other people who can do that), but our goal is ever increasingly aiming towards making clean websites that are easy to use so that they make the same impact without all the fancy doohickies.

Hawaii Teacher Standards Board

HTSB’s website design was fun. We got involved hiring a professional photographer to come out with some real teachers and students to take the shots for their website. This was a long time coming, I think we designed this site template almost 2 years ago but it’s taken their development team all this time to get it up. Awe! Nonetheless it’s good to see it up and running!

East Asian Marketing Strategies

EAMs is a company that specializes in marketing to…um…asian markets (DUH). We work with them a lot for translation and consulting when it comes to specifically marketing websites and advertisements in places like Korea, China, and Japan. When doing their site, our challenge was taking their very unique logo and personality into a website design that kept the same vibrant personality.

Kapiolani Community College

Kapiolani Community College had given us the opportunity to create some marketing material designed to draw young high-school kids into the college arena. The idea here was to create a website and handout material that demonstrated to these kids that college wasn’t as intimidating as they might think. We arranged photography of actual KCC students, demonstrated video & written testimonials, and tied that together with a consistent look in their print materials. We tried making something hip & cool without coming across too pandering to one specific group.

ParHawaii

The goal for this particular website was to create a site that could allow our Client to run the site without having to depend so heavily on her designer…in this case, that would be us! Why would we do that? I mean, as much as we love our clients, there are two things we love about this situation: (1) we put power back in the hands of the business owner to control a vital part of her business, and (2) it’s actually a matter of pride to see that the CSS design can hold up against any number of live changes that are put up against it.

Papa Ola Lokahi

If you’ve lived in Hawaii for any amount of time, it’s not difficult to notice that Native Hawaiian’s are very sensitive about their culture. Embarrassingly enough I’ve been here long enough to remember my early childhood years I even thought I WAS Hawaiian. I digress. The point about this project was that we had to spend hours and hours of time making sure the imagery and message of this site remain respectful to their culture. We were later recognized for our efforts by being awarded a Certificate of Merit plaque from the Hawaii Tourism Authority for this website.

Law Office of Wesley YS Chang

The challenge with this project was more of a social challenge rather then a technical one. How do you make a law firm that specializes in corporate documents feel approachable and a little fun?  How would you do that when these lawyers (who are all actually quite a blast when you get to know them) are all camera shy?  Well, I just busted out the trusty digi-cam, took shots of their beautiful office surroundings and eventually made them all feel comfortable enough to let me take their staff shots. If you see how good looking these lawyers are, you’d be like “Oh come on, these folks were camera shy?!”

Tiki’s Grill & Bar

This project was one of my success/failures. I think as site design goes, this one was one of my most unique and rewarding projects. It’s festive and kitschy just like how the popular restaurant is over in Waikiki. However, this site was so out there I ran into some trouble building this site before I was as familiar with CSS as I am now (oh man this would have been so much easier with CSS), and I think ultimately this design was so crazy you either loved it or hated it (the staff I was working with loved it, the boss…err…not so much). Hey we can’t win them all. Learn from mistakes.

Other Site Screenshots

Here is a collection of many of our other projects done over the years. Each one of these projects met specific challenges presented to us by our Clients and represents a snapshot of that time — what kinds of tools were available to us at that time, how the designs have evolved since then, and what needs they addressed. Some of these bring tears to my eyes….not for the good reasons either. But they worked back then!