Portfolio

Fine Line Painting

Fine Line Painting is a painting contractor company serving the Outer Banks and surrounding areas. It is my first one-page design and I am super pleased with the way it turned out! I love the smooth scrolling and simplicity. I used pink to accent the call-to-actions and headings, and to symbolize that it is a women-led painting business. In addition, I used tabs to condense the “services” section, especially for mobile users.

One of my favorite design elements is the skewed background of the "Meet the Owner" section, which is easily achieved with some CSS rather than using background images. This is important because it enhances page loading speed, especially when you're trying to load all of your information into a single page.

One-page designs are perfect for small business owners and there is always room to add more pages as you grow.

Two Roads Tavern

My husband Kyle opened Two Roads Tavern in the summer of 2016. He needed a website urgently before the start of the season, so I took a few days to complete his website and we've been making improvements along the way. The latest feature that I love is the Instagram feed on the home page. It's responsive to 2 columns on mobile and 4 columns on desktop. It's a great way for customers to see his daily specials and promotions.

The home page features a full-width hero image of the "sounds good" burger and a styled text overlay. The menu page incorporates professional photos of the food for each category. The contact page includes a google Map, secure email form, and the reCAPTCHA checkbox to prevent spam.

Another fun thing I programmed into the website is social media contests. If Kyle wants to run a gift card giveaway on Facebook / Instagram, he can link back to a page on his website that collects participant info. This provides a way to keep track of contestants and communicate with the winner.

Kyle is very happy with his website, especially since his wife is able to keep up with menu and content changes, domain registration, hosting, etc.

Lucky 12 Tavern

Lucky 12 Tavern is an Outer Banks restaurant established in 2006. Mark initially hired me to maintain his existing WordPress website. However, it was visually outdated and beginning to have security issues, and no one had been trained to use the CMS to update the content, images, etc. I took one look at the 5 page website and asked myself… does this site really need a CMS? This is often the case with many small businesses! Together we decided to nix WordPress and redesign the site with simplicity and speed in mind. Rich Coleman took some beautiful photos of the food and atmosphere, and I incorporated these images throughout the site.

Another big priority was the menu. Instead of having a pdf/image of the menu, I typed out the full menu and used responsive tabs to separate the lunch, dinner, pizza, kids, and drink menu. Having a text menu is very important for SEO; this simple change added a lot of keyword-rich content to the site.

Next on the list was displaying a social media feed. Mark does a lot of his own social media marketing, so we definitely wanted to include this content on the home page. In this case, I used the Facebook plugin and customized it to blend in with the rest of the page.

Finally, I added the Google Maps API to help customers find the restaurant and developed a secure contact form to accept any inquiries about the restaurant.