Hey there!
I'm Brandan. I create websites for a living. You can see some of the sites I've made down below, or talk with me about working together.
St. Timothy's
Redesign of the site for St. Timothy's Episcopal Church in Greenville, NC (my hometown). It features photo albums, video history, a calendar, audio from the most recent sermon, and a lot of great information for visitors and new parishioners.
My dad had been maintaining the site for several years. Like most projects, it simply got too big for its britches and became difficult to organize (for Dad) and navigate (for everyone else). After many hours of discussion and at least a few mind maps, we got the site from nearly 50 pages down to 11 while addressing the old site's issues with media, accessibility, and visual consistency.
Dad's quite pleased with the new design, although he insists that we really just put a new skin on his site!
Lime Tiger
Redesign of Angie Kirby's portfolio site. Angie is the graphic designer that I work with on all of my sites. If you like how my work looks, you have her to thank. (Other than this site, which was all me. But you could probably tell that…)
The old limetiger.com was a simple Flash site designed and executed by Angie. In (something similar to) her own words, the site was only usable by other designers — the rest of us were having trouble figuring out where the content was. Thankfully, she recognized that she needed to pull the important stuff out of Flash into the more accessible medium of HTML, and the rest is history.
Animighty
One-page site for Jim Regan, an animator in Raleigh, NC. He recently embarked on his freelancing career and needed a portfolio site to show his work to potential clients. It seems to be working: Jim has work every time I talk to him!
The videos are displayed using a cute utility called LightWindow. It's a little flashier than simply embedding a media player, and it removes some of the headache associated with embedded media players. Jim can change his samples without having to worry about file format or getting someone (me) to update the code on the site. It also freed our layout from the necessity of accommodating multiple large video players.
You'll need QuickTime Player to view his movies, but you can look at the site with any old browser.
WRJ Building Company
Brochure site for Wes Johnson, a home builder in Raleigh, NC. Wes needed a web presence, but nothing too extensive. The site features a simple photo gallery of homes he has built in the past.
Johnson Realty & Investments
Brochure site for Rye Johnson, a realtor in Raleigh, NC. Rye is Wes Johnson's sister (his site is just above), so Rye finds the clients and Wes builds them houses. Go team!
Some of the pages on the site are still works-in-progress, so they link to other sites for the time being.
About my work
Web designers face a number of obstacles in their work. I'm convinced that I create simply wonderful websites, so I'd like to tell you how I deal with some of these obstacles:
- Users want your site to tell them about you:
- You and I will collaboratively discuss what's most important to your users (and therefore what really belongs on your site).
- The organization of my sites is clean and transparent.
- I don't allow pages to become cluttered with gratuitous visual or organizational elements that distract users from the information they want.
- You want a beautiful site:
- My graphic designer buddy, Angie Kirby, has been in the business for 15 years.
- We both subscribe to the philosophy of simplicity and openness in our designs. Give your users room to breathe!
- Every detail counts — from color palette to typography, your site deserves to look like a professional designed it.
- Web browsers don't play nicely with each other:
- Everything I create adheres to published web standards (XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 2.1, if you're curious). Then I make it work with Internet Explorer.
- Nothing on my sites depends on JavaScript to function properly — but I'm not afraid to whip out Prototype on occasion.
That said, I'm confident that I can build you a great website, so let me know if you're interested in working together. I'm looking forward to it!
Brandan




