imagiNed web designfor websites designed with imagination
Hello, my name is Ned "imagiNed" Buratovich and I build websites. Let me build one for you.
Now before you say, "Hey, Ned, your own portfolio page right here doesn't show much imagination," may I point out that it's your imagination I'll be using... Well, your imagination plus my imagination. Together, we will transform your vision into a well crafted reality.
This portfolio page is a simple way to give you a super-fast overview of my work, so you can get some idea of whether you'd consider me for your project or not.
When we develop your project, expect a high degree of personal interaction. I view the creative process (especially in the formative / specification stages) to be a collaboration, and to be a rewarding one at that. (Translation: easy to work with, and fun).
I'm not one of these design shops that will have you fill out a form, take your money and then a month or two later (often with no option for you to review the work in progress) present you with a done deal, and often a disappointing one.
I've been building my web design business just about two years now and my unique skill is not just that I know the technology (I was a software engineer for 25 years, so I do), but that I know how to communicate with my clients. When I understand what you want to achieve, when I explain to you the cost/benefit aspects of various designs and technologies, then we can design a website, or an online marketing campaign, or an SEO rework of an existing site "with imagination."
I take pride in my creativity, and pride of workmanship permeates every job I do. My current clients give me business because I produce professional quality results that accommodate their needs, schedules and budgets... and because we enjoy working together in an atmosphere of mutual respect. (I don't pose as a know-it-all prima donna.)
Obviously this page is no fancy-schmancy marketing website (not that there's anything wrong with that, and I can write effective "market-speak" when called upon to do so.) Almost all of my work comes to me by word of mouth, personal referrals from past or current clients, and usually these prospective clients expect a website where they can see a little more of the scope of my work. That's probably why you came here too, so take a look around...
and enjoy!
A Basic "Brochure" Website
This website is mostly text, with a few stock graphics added for accent. Inter-page navigation is via a horizontal menu-bar with highlighting buttons that runs across the top of the page under the simple header.
This basic website is entirely adequate for describing this consultant's professional services and announcing his training class schedules. It also accepts online payments for classes via integration with his PayPal account.
Nothing fancy, no web-forms, no JavaScript, just HTML and CSS, just six pages.
Give a glance to this "brochure" website
A Basic Small Business Website
Classic design with a graphic header, sidebar with button navigation menu and informational footer on every page. Several graphic/photo illustrations in the content area of each of the pages. A basic "Contact Us" web-form and simple e-commerce via Google Checkout.
This mailbox renting business has its business proposition clearly described to prospective customers in the narrative flow of the main copy as well as in the naming of the menu buttons.
See an affordable business website
An Advanced Small Business Website
This site was designed for a champion show dog breeder. The challenge was coming up with a visual motif that evoked the lost land of Atlantis (which was the business name.)
There were many puppy pictures which had to be displayed in an organized way. The pages feature collapsible panels which open/close to reveal multiple thumbnails/captions which, when clicked, display the photo in a larger feature pane. Each dog has his own doggie database (custom XML file) to feed these sections, making this type of site organization (thumbnails in collapsible panels) appropriate for any site that has many photos to display.
A unique aspect of this design: the pages can change length dynamically and drastically, and the ocean gets progressively darker all the way down to the seabed, which blends in flawlessly whether the water is shallow or deep.
See this advanced business website
A Fun/Personal "Vanity" Website
A one page website (subsequently expanded to two pages) with a custom designed hot-rod motif and a clickable slide show featuring a dozen custom-framed photos of Grumpy's truck. When the page loads it even plays the sound of a '51 Ford starting up.
Actually, there is no Grumpy's Speed Shop, just a guy with an old truck that has the decal on the doors. He's a client of mine in a corporate account and asked me to design a site for his personal enjoyment and for under $400 - which I did.
Now, when people stop him on the street to ask about the speed shop, he sends them to this website. Catch something fun and fast
A Professional/Medical Office Website
A tastefully designed site for an upscale doctor's office in Arizona with a subdued dessert color scheme and a multi-level drop-down menu bar in Southwest sunburst colors.
This was a site rebuild. The text was already online and the doctors just said, "Make it pretty," because it was ugly. (Go see.) I created all the graphics, added photos and integrated PDFs of the doctors' articles. I completely reorganized the site navigation to be logical and easy to follow.
A Splashier Small Business Sales Site
This site features a home "splash" page with a stunning visual image and a slide show that appears in the corner, showing clients who achieved physiques like that of their coach. The splash page menu bar offers navigation to any page on the site.
Inside the site, there is a clickable slide show and videos of competitors in action. The videos were edited into web-streamable segments from DVDs provided by the site owner. Sales of diet and fitness plans were implemented by integration with PayPal.
Admire a body that builds business
A Charity Appeal Website
A client of mine asked me "a HUGE favor." A 4-year old girl, granddaughter of her friend, had been diagnosed with brain cancer and her family saddled with overwhelming medical costs. Would I build a website to collect donations for this little girl?
I asked about the girl and learned that she dreamed of being a princess. I decided to build her a princess castle on the web and tell her story with slide shows of her progress and links to news stories and family blogs. This site collected significant donations via PayPal (now only by mail)
I put my heart into this site and donated all of my time. Cost for a site like this: Priceless. Experience a real-life fairy tale
A Travel Tour Website - Rebuilt
This site re-design project was more like a total tear-down and rebuild from the ground up. About the only thing I kept was the orange/green color scheme that my client wanted (and made it work). The site organization, navigation and every line of underlying code was completely re-done.
The tour payment process, which had been spread over 7-8 separate pages has now been consolidated onto a single registration/payment page and reintegrated back into the pre-existing PayPal back end.
Something that adds to the coolness factor is that, when the home page loads, the logo comes riding down the curvy road, taking the turns just like a motorcycle, then jumps into its place on the header. Are you ready to ride!?
An Entertainment Professional Website
Talk about visually ornate, with this site I decided to go for Baroque. Stage curtain sashes drop down to reveal menu items, picture frames on the side flash through multiple characters when pointed at. Hundreds of thumbnails on inner pages switch images, videos, even complete songs from this performer's CDs to play from a central screen.
This site is busy, which is entirely appropriate for this singer/actress who sends potential clients here to preview her before hiring her for a gig.
This is a one-of-a-kind custom site. Get ready to see the show
A Commercial Rental Business Website
I worked extremely closely with the business owner to develop both this site and the Google AdWords campaigns that, in the first year of operation, doubled his gross receipts over the previous year.
This site cleanly presents his rental fleet and his business process to customers world wide. It features a 100% custom designed rental estimate calculator and online reservation system that feeds into his office accounting software over SSL secure encrypted links.
To appeal to motorcyclists, the owner wanted his navigation buttons to "burst into flame." See how easy renting a motorcycle can be
A Documentary Website
The objective here was to document the production of a theatrical play on the web, but the documenting would be done by my (non-technical) client, and she'd be doing it from Barcelona, Spain.
I proposed a blog as an ideal platform for documenting a process and radically customized a Blogger template to be fed with YouTube videos and Flickr slideshows. I tutored my client in PC procedures, blog post editing, camcorder operation, basic photo and video editing software and other skills she would need to do all of her own content creation and site updating overseas. I also set up a mirror site to switch languages between English & Catalan with the click of a button (with translations provided to me from a professional translation service paid for by my client).
Because so many hours were spent in tutoring, it's difficult for me to price out the actual development cost (my standard rate is $60/hour). However, this project demonstrates how customization and integration of free web services (Blogger, YouTube, Flickr) enabled my client to create a professional-looking web-based documentary. Witness a play in the making [Note: these two sites are temporarily unavailable for viewing (as of April 2, 2010). I'm in the process of recreating them in a non-Blogger environment for your viewing.]
e-Commerce Integration
This beauty product sales site was not designed by me, but I was called in to select and integrate all the software systems for e-commerce: the shopping cart, the payment authorization gateway, the real-time shipping calculations... everything necessary for a customer to add products to the cart, check out with a variety of payment methods, generate packing lists, invoices, receipts, etc.
In anticipation of adding hundreds of products, I engineered a compact page re-design with pop-up windows for product detail and the automatic generation of product pages from a database backend.
Compare an original, hand-coded page to the database generated page with product pop-ups.
Search Engine Optimized from the Ground Up
I didn't design the look of this website. I took the layout from a free online template, added my own graphics and then SEO engineered every other aspect of it (from the file names on up) so the site would rank highly for the search terms, "House Sitter" or "House Sitting" and "Menlo Park," a very desirable city to live in (for me.)
Yes, this site is for MY house-sitting business and I didn't care if it didn't have ground-breaking design. I did care that people looking for house sitters in my target geographic area could find ME. Findablity is crucial for any online business that depends on search engine traffic to attract visitors. I won't give you a link to this site, just type "House Sitter Menlo Park" into Google and find me on the first page.
A Fun, Funny Online Sales Site
This website is basically one page that paints a picture in the visitors mind. The layout is straight-line simple, a classic one-page sales letter site.
The entire site narrative has only ONE function: to steer the visitor toward making a buying descison. (It's no small feat to entice a procrastinator to make a decision NOW.) I wrote the sales copy in an offhanded tone to engage the visitor to follow it all the way to the end, while at the same time the sentences were SEO engineered to attract visitors in the first place. This site had better sell a boatload of calendars, because, once again, I am my own client here.
Plan to visit ProcrastinatorsCalendar.com later I think it's a very entertaining read, if I do say so myself.
Product Gallery and Detail Pages
This fully functional website prototype was developed for a photo framing studio but is applicable to any business that displays a gallery of products indexing into a detail/order page for each product. The product information is contained in a MySQL database on the server, and bookmarkable, search-engine friendly detail pages are generated by a CMS (Content Management System, in this case ExpressionEngine). ExpressionEngine also runs the backend Control Panel for data entry.
Custom features of the gallery page are resizablility to fit a larger number of product thumbnails for customers with larger screens and hover pop-ups for ultra fast scanning of product enlargements or summaries.
The product detail/order page (shown here) includes an innovative ordering matrix, with product options arranged in rows and columns, prices shown in each cell, where one click takes you directly to that option in the shopping cart. (In this prototype, it's PayPal, and yes, all the shopping cart links are live and will actually take your money.)
There are next/previous buttons for stepping through the photos/products without having to return to the gallery page. The enlargement button takes you to a full window viewing of the photo, and in both full-window and inset view, the photo sizes dynamically to adjust to your window size.
Take a tour through this demo gallery and see how easy it is to find your way to what you want.
When I first started designing and building websites, I didn't build in all the optimizations that make a site or a page attractive to search engines. Now I always do (unless you just need an online brochure / billboard site - which is adequate for many businesses). For SEO directed research and development, my rates are $80/hour. Any competent web professional will tell you that good SEO is literally worth its weight in gold. I agree. It's one thing to make a website that looks good, but a whole 'nother thing to make a good-looking website that makes your bank account look good too.
If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to call or email me. If you'd like to find out even more about the quality of my work, and how I am to work with, I invite you to go to any of the websites listed above, call the business owners and ask them any questions you'd like.