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Indiewire Website Design

Apt Design — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 00:11:23 +0000

If you’re looking for the latest news and reviews on all things in the movie industry, IndieWire is one of the heavy-hitters on the web. They provide insight and coverage on everything coming out of Hollywood. They just needed a good website to put it all on. I worked with my friends at Tribe again to design a new IndieWire.com from the ground up.

Depth, depth, depth

The content you can drill down through on this site is just awesome. Not only did we have to design for all of it, we had to make sure visitors wouldn’t get confused while they were moving from story to gallery to review. We spend hours wireframing the best way to tell each section’s story.

Powerful Widgets

On some websites the sidebar widgets are an afterthought, thrown in to take up space. Not so on IndieWire. Each widget throughout the site offers fresh content, relevant links, and standalone info about current movies. We wanted to make sure the user understood this too. Careful consideration was given to make each widget appealing, easy to understand, and part of an integrated whole while it offered it’s own unique message.

A Vast Network

But IndiWire.com isn’t the only part of this project. The site features a huge network of other blogs and sites that feed into IndieWire. One of the problems we solved was unifying all these sites into a more cohesive network. We created a number of corresponding design template so that each network could choose a similar look, while getting options for making their own site unique.

Nominated for a Webby

The new design didn’t go unnoticed. In 2012 IndieWire was nominated for a Webby Award (the Oscars of the web). Go check out in the Media: Movie and Film category!

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Zillow Blog

Apt Design — Fri, 06 May 2011 18:06:37 +0000

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This is another exciting project I worked on for Shane&Peter Inc. Zillow has an overall brand that we worked within to create a cleaner, more modern feeling style site. We also took a look at the content on the current blog and surfaced the most important features and stories, making the site more easily navigable by users.

As one of the two lead designers I was responsible for designing concepts of the site, detailing the final design, developing design direction, and working to make sure design elements stayed consistent across the entire site.

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New Projects: Wenatchee Valley Chamber and AP College Football

Apt Design — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 03:28:42 +0000

I don’t usually write blog posts about finishing projects (you can just see them in my portfolio), but I’ve recently finished two huge projects that were a lot of fun and that turned out really great. Thought I’d let you know about them.

The first is for the Wenatchee Valley Chamber of Commerce. I’ve been updating the Chambers old site for a few years and was excited when they decided they were ready to move ahead with a brand new site. Wenatchee is one of the greatest places to live on the planet and I’m excited to get to help promote it. Read more about my work with the staff at the Chamber in my portfolio, or head straight on over to their new site: www.wenatchee.org

Another big project recently finished was for the Associated Press. I was brought in as one of the lead designers on a freelance team put together by Shane&Peter Inc. It was an awesome team for an awesome project. I got to work with some high-caliber designers, developers and thinkers and we put together a website which in now the source for news about college football and the AP Poll. Read more about the project in my portfolio, or go get your football fix at the AP College Football site.

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AP College Football Website

Apt Design — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 03:26:25 +0000

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This is one of my first projects that I worked on as a freelancer for Shane&Peter Inc., and we started things off big. The Associated Press was looking to get some of their news and expertise directly to consumers; their rankings Poll is one of their standout enterprises. Our team was tasked with the idea of putting together a site that would showcase both their extensive depth of college football news and their proprietary AP Poll, and look good doing it.

As a site for hardcore fans you can wade deep into football stats and stories, this site has all the information you could ever want. It also has great interactive features like Create Your Own Poll and the ability to reconfigure the site based on your favorite team.

As one of the two lead designers I was responsible for designing concepts of the site, creating sections and details of the final design, interacting with the team to develop design direction, and working to make sure design elements stayed consistent across the entire site.

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Wenatchee Valley Sports Council Website

Apt Design — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 23:00:52 +0000

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The Wenatchee Valley Sports Council was in dire need of a new website. The Council is a key resource for locals and visitors interested in any and all sports facilities and happenings in the Valley. However their old site was hard to navigate, information was hard to read, and the updating process was not as quick and smooth as it could have been. Eric Granstrom approached Apt Design to help rework their site, and I was excited to work with him. The Sports Council’s new website organizes their wealth of information much better for their visitors and presents it in a much more readable format. We added the ability to update the site with News articles, and even pull in the very latest news from Twitter. Eric was thrilled to be able to update every part of the new site quickly and easily himself .

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Apple Annie’s Antiques Website

Apt Design — Fri, 14 May 2010 15:30:26 +0000

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Apple Annie’s Antique Mall in Cashmere, Washington is one of the biggest in the entire U.S. But their website was badly outdated and no longer reflected was what going on at the store. So Apt Design got together with the management to create a new website that was much simpler, gave a better sense of the mall’s atmosphere, and could easily be updated in the future. We worked with professional copywriter Jennifer Korfiatis to create all-new content for the site, and used the design style across other design pieces, including a new rack card. The owners are very happy with the new look and the website has been driving traffic, and ultimately sales, to the mall.

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RunWenatchee.com

Apt Design — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 01:14:13 +0000

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With spectacular outdoor settings and tons of great weather the Wenatchee Valley is a great place for running. RunWenatchee was created to be a central portal for information about local running events and local routes, as well as for general training and nutrition advice that every runner can use. Set up in an easy to read blog format the website easily lets readers find pertinent articles; while on the backend the RunWenatchee crew is able to easily administrate all aspects of their site, including ads, polls, videos and more.

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Dr. Parkhurst Website

Apt Design — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:00:03 +0000

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To round out Dr. Parkhurst’s complete identity (after creating a new logo and business cards), Apt Design helped create a new website for this dentist’s office. A warm, simple color scheme and rounded edges invite clients to learn more about how comfortable dentistry can be. The website is now a great reference for clients and time-saving tool for the office.

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Gold’s Gym Blog

Apt Design — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:22:17 +0000

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There are two Gold’s Gyms in the Wenatchee Valley and they employ almost a dozen personal trainers. Gold’s Gym approached Apt Design to help them create a web solution that would allow the staff to share their fitness knowledge with the public and to create an online health community. We designed a fully-featured custom blog that allows for multiple authors, easy commenting from readers, video embedding, polls and more. The Wenatchee Valley Gold’s Gym Blog is now the premiere website for expert fitness advice and information for all of North Central Washington.

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Patrick Ward PhD Website

Apt Design — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 23:05:30 +0000

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Dr. Patrick Ward is a marriage counselor in West Virginia who had a treasure trove of blog posts with great information about family, parenting, stress and relationships. What he needed was a blog site that exhibited this great content and allowed his visitors to easily find articles that would help. Dr. Ward also wanted it to be easy for clients to learn more about his office and practice. The new website has already propelled Dr. Ward’s site to the top of search engine rankings, provided a clean layout for his blog posts and archives, and brought new customers through his door.