Sites

Our main site (Spero Consulting):

Through time, we have refined our theme: both for design and functional reasons.

Recently, we moved to a “two-column” format to make the design more compatible with our mobile-phone-browser design. The second column appears everywhere except the home page and permits easy navigation around the site. That is important because visitors from search-engines rarely arrive on the home page. (Many folks over-estimate the importance of the home page and clutter it with every conceivable option and link. They, themselves, are not distracted, because they know where every link goes, but guests, well, that is a different story! We strive for elegance and focus.)

Our main site, like all the others shown below, features a unique “favicon.” A favicon is the small icon on the browser’s tab or title bar that identifies the site. (Because we like to think of ourselves as “all-round hounds,” we use an image of a Basenji head. Basenjis are the barkless dogs from Africa that sleep on our couch all day.)

We host the same content at SperoConsulting.mobi, which is optimized for viewing from mobile phones, i.e., there’s almost no graphics. Our site is smart enough to determine how the visitor is arriving at it; so, it (usually) automatically sends guests to the site with the best viewing experience for the visitor’s device. Using our technology, most types of businesses can easily host .Mobi sites. Once it is setup, there is nothing to do, and development costs are nominal.

raspberry photo:

This site has many attractive features, including amazing slide shows and an integrated and password-protected shopping cart for secure, on-line transaction processing.

raspberry photo operates in and near Pittsburgh, PA. Its specialty is on-location portrait photography of children and families.

The Flash-based shopping cart permits on-line proofing and purchasing of photos. Although it is independent of the site’s main web application the cart appears to be seamlessly integrated with the rest of the site.

When developing a graphically-oriented site, there are many factors and trade-offs to consider. Size and quality of the images are among the most important. Large, high-quality photos only look good on large, high-resolution monitors and screens, and they require fast internet connections or the download wait time is excruciatingly slow.

Attempting to view large images on a small, web-book’s screen is a nuisance. So, should site operators use small, lower-quality images that everyone can view (poorly), or should they use large, high-quality images that show slowly and inconveniently on cheap equipment? It depends on the target market, and what likely visitors and prospects have in their homes and offices.

Rampart Hydro:

Rampart had a large, html-based site with a lot of information and many photos and videos. We redesigned the look and reorganized and rewrote the content adding many slide shows. Slide shows are a great way to compactly present information, and if one believes that pictures are worth 1,000 words, then slide shows are a great use of space.

Rampart’s corporate colors are blue, white and black. We added a touch of environmentally-friendly green, and used the bright, splash in the background to evoke their ultra-high pressure hydro-demolition spray, which cleans surfaces of contaminants and destroys concrete, too.

In the first three months of that the new site was live, traffic increased 2600%.

We re-sized several of the images–making them substantially larger–and added many images of project venues, e.g., airports, military bases, bridges, etc.

Recruit Our High School Athletes:

This is a directory site, where high school athletes can easily showcase their talents (in a search-engine optimized way). We’re particularly proud of the use of off-the-shelf form software that students use to enter their profiles.

Profiles, which include up to nine photos and three embedded YouTube™ videos, can be updated as frequently as desired.

Every word of every profile is searchable, so coaches can locate and read about the athletes they need.

The site also includes a standard shopping cart that automatically integrates with the user-management system.

Because the site is very easy for coaches to use, we anticipate that it will grow very quickly.

SAAA:

This site has very detailed calendar that can host either private or public schedules. The site also features multi-page registration forms and an integrated web store that links to PayPal for on-line payments, which greatly simplifies registration and administration by the association’s volunteers.

The header graphic is a small portion of a photo of a backyard bonfire, and the little crown over the “Al’s” is from a photo of the huge centerpiece over the altar. See below for another use of the crown.

St. Alphonsus Church:

The crown of doves flying downward–not bats in a protective ring–is the center piece of the Church. The giant crown hangs by a multitude of wires above the altar and serves as the focal point for the oddly-shaped church. With our graphic arts software we erased the wires, changed its texture to match the metallized title text, and added the lighting effects. Those effects make it seem that the header is lit from above and in front of the viewer’s monitor. The panel is a montage of stained glass windows in the original Church building–dating from 1898 or so.

The similarities between the Church site and the SAAA site aren’t a coincidence. We designed a basic scheme using the school colors and adapted each to its particularly uses and functions.

Greve-Davis Consulting:

Formerly Greve Consulting and Metreks, this site features a front-page video, which can easily be converted into a slide show. With our content management system and image apps, videos and podcasts are easily self-managed.

The theme is bright, modern, and focused. By blogging frequently, Curtis is able to substantially increase traffic to his site, and that has resulted in several consulting engagements.

Greve Davis also has a mobi site, which give visitors on cell phones an improved experience with much faster page-loading speeds.

Insight Rising:

This site features a rotating header and a unique home page. In this case the environment is placed above the firm’s name and business.

Insight Rising is a sustainability consulting firm based in Pittsburgh, PA. Its motto is: Business Consultants for Sustainable Profits.

The firm takes a common-sense approach to sustainability and “going green,” i.e., that the intelligent choice of sustainable policies and procedures are both short-term profit- and long-term value-maximizing.

Its founder and CEO, Bob McNeice, believes that because of the wealth-maximizing effect of such policies, their adoption is inevitable; so prospective client firms and organizations should “go with the flow” to a sustainable and profitable future. That’s why the rotating header shows various photos of water–mostly flowing, although a few are thrown in just because they’re beautiful.

The various shades of blue throughout the design template evoke feelings of water and the earth when viewed from afar, i.e., the “Blue Marble,” and the green highlights complement the scheme and remind one of the link between sustainability and good environmental practices and… profits.

The firm’s new logo is based upon the familiar, Apollo-era photo of the earth rising above the moon’s surface: stark, alone, self-sustaining, but clearly rising. In our rendition, the practical, no-nonsense motto replaces the moon’s horizon.

We would be happy to show prospective clients the look of their old site and their logo before our re-design.

Like our site, InsightRising.mobi hosts the firm’s content without intensive graphics.

ArcofWPA:

This is was a large project. Unfortunately, after the project was completed, many of the site’s links were broken, and fixing those problems is outside of our control. It is still beautiful–just not very functional.

It includes six independent, yet linked, installations, which are subdomains, e.g., help.ArcofWPA.org. Many of the sites can be accessed via multiple names, e.g., http://MH.ArcofWPA.org and http://Residential-Recovery.org. for their mental health subsidiary. The use of multiple domain names pointing to the same site is very useful and very inexpensive. It permits each legal and operating entity to manage its own web presence.

The sites include an on-line store/transaction center that is integrated into the content management system, a full-featured calendar, and a community blog/chatroom for families of clients.

The background was generated by cutting a single horizontal line of a photo of a clear blue sky–one pixel tall by a couple of thousand pixels across–and vertically repeating it. It has almost a denim look and shows the variety of colors in a “blue sky.” The background of the tag-line on the right is the deformed and elongated sun from the same sky photo. We think it has a casual, inviting look that won’t scare away visitors seeking help for themselves or a loved one.

The header photos on each of the sites rotate showing clients and employees.

Many of the photos on the site were taken by Bonnie DeMatteo of Raspberry Photo. We highly recommend her.

PD Innovation:

The main PD logo was already designed. We used lightning striking it to illustrate the spark–the electricity–of the creative effort and energy needed to transform an idea into a marketable product, a successful campaign, and increased profits.

The light hits the firm’s existing logo, illuminates it, and spreads. The rest of the design is clean and focused and attention-getting.

By hosting a variety of social, community, and networking content (on hidden or password-protected pages) the owner is able to drive a substantial amount of traffic to his site.

BWAM (But What About Me?):

This is our fledgling web store. It uses a sophisticated, industrial-strength shopping cart web application (versus a content management system), but that is about to change. (Shopping carts integrated into content management systems are just too easy to pass on.)

Note the SSL certificate on the right. The on-line stores uses a fully-integrated PayPal module (Web Sites Pro) that allows transactions to be processed on our site, rather than through a redirection to PayPal. That’s why the SSL security certificate is necessary. It verifies for guests that the site is linked our corporation. (Other, cheaper, SSL certificates verify that the site is linked o the owner of the domain name. Often that is sufficient security for customers.)

By the way, a PayPal Web Sites Pro account includes a virtual terminal capabilities, which permits phone and in-person orders.

W A Gregory and Associates:

This site is for a CPA firm in Western Pennsylvania. The staff wanted a bright.modern color scheme. On the home page we used “shadows” of images that were used on other pages. The home page cleanly and concisely communicates the firm’s services, and the header uses a gray-and-white image of Pittsburgh’s Golden Triangle for the background. That subtle, background image was used to imply that the firm serves all of Western Pennsylvania–not just the communities surrounding its location. As time permits, the staff will continue to add content and announcements of ever-changing accounting and tax laws.

Fato International Consulting:

This is a small site for a consultant wanting a simple web presence. It is very inexpensive to operate. We designed it around her existing brochure and improved the graphics as needed.

Oakhaven Homeowners’ Association:

This is a small subdivision site with a map, password-protected resident directories, and an easy-to-use and administer classified ad section. The header graphic is ‘impasto painting’ effect applied to an autumn photograph of the monument at the subdivision’s main entrance.