Category: wordpress

10 WordPress Web Design and Business Identity Clients In 2024

Posted on by Stephen

This is my annual look back, to thank the 28 web design and business identity clients I worked with in 2024. I’m grateful to you all, but have a top ten list that describes the main services I provided and showcases what kinds of clients I work with. I also hope to give these clients a little boost of visibility.

1. Seattle Basements

My newest client is Seattle Basements, subsidiary of Cherry Design and Build, owned by Sam Adams. I appreciate Sam trusting me to design and build Seattle Basement’s business identity and online presence. From the logo to the website, photo editing to search engine optimization. It was my intention to build a business identity that presented his portfolio of previous basement projects in a way that any home owner would trust that the next basement remodel or build-out could be theirs.

2. Dr. Keith B. Wong, Orthodontist

Keith B. Wong, DDS, MS, is an orthodontic specialist who treats adults and children with Invisalign aligners, invisible Brava lingual appliance, and digital precision braces. Dr. Wong has been my client since 2011. This year, the main focus was web maintenance, updating content, and modifying the page structure to improve the site’s search engine optimization. We finished up the year with a holiday card that Keith illustrated himself!

3. Anita Nowacka, Photographer

Anita Nowacka is a very talented and hard working photographer in Seattle. She specializes in family photography and portraits in outdoor environments. In 2015, Anita asked me to redesign her website. This year, I’ve been maintaining her site, helping write her blog articles, and managing her site’s search engine optimization and Google My Business profile. The photography field is very competitive, so I’m continually working on new ways to keep Anita “in front of her customers” in the Seattle area.

4. The Seattle Series

The Seattle Series is a classical chamber music series featuring world-class Seattle-based artists and their special guests from around the nation and globe. Bi-annually the organization has typically 3 concerts that are intimate, affordable, and of the highest quality. This client merges my love for classical music with my skill at coding in WordPress. One of my biggest professional challenges is being responsible for building a ticketing system that can be bought on the website and provides the music patron with tickets to go to the show.

5. Camp MoxyJo’s

Camp MoxyJo’s is a private campground in Federal Way, WA providing stays in several retro style campers and rooms. I built a WordPress website for Camp MoxyJo’s from 2023 to 2024 with a reservations section. Building a site that takes payments is an extra challenge. The way I accomplished the task was to look at Camp MoxyJo’s like it was a small motel and treat every camper like a room in that motel. Although they use HipCamp and AirBnB, our intention was to add a third hub for reservations and payment to add to their income.

6. Christopher Wright, Architecture

Christopher Wright is a Seattle architect with a modern Pacific Northwest style that focuses on the craft and process of designing homes. His work reminds me of my father’s architecture from the 1960’s and 1970s, that has evolved into spaces we wish to live in today. I appreciate the opportunity to design and maintain his website and help promote his online presence. This year we built an In the Works section and made a more user friendly site navigation.

7. Northwest Dharma Association

The Northwest Dharma Association is a non-profit that provides a one location online presence for Buddhism in the Pacific Northwest. Their website promotes Events, provides News that is edited by a skilled writer, and dedicated Buddhist practitioner, and lists most Buddhist Groups and organizations in the Pacific Northwest ranging from Alaska to Oregon, Theravada to Zen. The Northwest Dharma is one of my longest clients going back to 2008 when I opened the business.

8. Lane Engineering Consulting, P.C.

Lane Engineering in is an engineering consulting firm in New York and New Jersey. I designed and built their new online presence with a logo, several digital illustrations, WordPress website, and print collateral. This year I simply worked on their business cards for their growing team.

9. Johnny B Painting, LLC

Johnny B does high quality remodeling, interior painting, exterior painting, and wood finishing for homes in the Seattle metro area. Starting several years ago as their web designer, I have branched out my services to architectural photography and photo editing for the many home interior photo portfolios on his website. I also occasionally design his newsletters with a custom illustration. I appreciate that the owner, John Bridenstine gives me the opportunity to exercise my creativity in the fields I am highly skilled, like illustration, while also expand into new fields like architectural photography and photo editing.

10. AFM 689 Musicians’ Association

AFM 689 is the Musicians’ Union for Eugene. Thanks to the AFM Local 76-493 in Seattle who I’ve worked for since opening my web design business, the Eugene local asked I build a similar payment system for member’s dues. Any time money transactions are involved, my work becomes purely technical having to strictly plan out every detail of the process including a lot of conditional logic questions until you reach the correct amount of payment. Finally, setting up a stable and secure system that processes the payments. Once again, my love of music merges with my professional work.

The Benefits of Annually Reviewing My Web Design Business

This top 10 list should give you some ideas that you might desire for your online presence. It is a great way for me to thank my clients, but also see the patterns behind who I work with and the services I provide. The people I work with tend to have a profession or aspect of their process that I relate to. And, while I call myself a web designer, you can see from the variety of skills I have, for most of my clients, I create an online presence and business identity.

WordPress 6.1 in 2023

Posted on by Stephen

More than ever before, I would recommend WordPress as your platform of choice for most website solutions. As we all know, new technologies are continually rendering old technologies obsolete. For several years there was a time when I was thinking Squarespace would put WordPress out of business. I was concerned about Squarespace’s popularity because, as a designer, Squarespace takes all the design choices out of the equation, making the work nothing but sliding boxes around on the screen. WordPress had the accurate reputation for being “complicated”, while Squarespace’s drag and drop builder was easy to use by even novice web users. It also did not help that WordPress is a prime target of attack from hackers due to it’s popularity.

In 2022 I saw a shift where WordPress’ beta visual editor was “catching up” to the ease of use that Squarespace provides. And, plugins like Wordfence were doing an excellent job warding off hackers, and technologies like Google’s recaptcha was stopping spam.

In 2023, I was confirmed that I had made the right choice continuing to double down on WordPress. Their new user interface and editor allows me to design anything, while still making it easy for me to had the maintenance over to clients if they choose to do the maintenance themselves. More often than not, I’ve found it to be better for me to continue maintaining the site, because most of my clients are too busy with their own business to add web maintenance to their montly tasks.

The new core of WordPress comes with a theme that can essentially replace most any other theme. Even though I feel badly for all the designers who made themes for WordPress anticipating this to be a never ending source of income, I was finding that this saturation of theme options was missing the point of design entirely. You don’t need thousands of design options to pick from, you need a designer who with a few key choices builds a design from the same provided “theme”. The 2023 theme does just that. I will be able to use this theme to build any design. It is essentially the scaffolding for a house, of a skeleton theme. I’ve built my 2023 redesign with this theme.

See how Schildbach Design can design your new site with this theme.

Client Showcase: Northwest Dharma Association

Posted on by Stephen

Because Schildbach Design takes a humanist approach toward branding opposed to showing off the technological aspects of online branding, we tend to get a lot of non-profit work. The Northwest Dharma Association was one of Schildbach Design’s first clients, and we still work with them today (2008-present). The NWDA is a buddhist organization that promotes and helps Buddhist organizations in the Pacific Northwest be visible by providing listings of their organization and events. The board and leaders of their organization were very tolerant of my learning web design in the ’00’s and early ’10s. But, now I’m able to provide all of the customized services they request. And, their website is filled with customizations.

After several iterations over the past 15 years, the site has stabilized to provide a password protected member group area, an events area, a blog, and an extensive biannually Northwest Dharma News (an online magazine dedicated to Buddhism in the Pacific Northwest). A website this large and complex is not usually built by one person, usually this would be done by a team of web developers. But, non-profits are on a tight budget, so Schildbach Design took on the difficult task of creating all of these custom sections with one primary developer (me), and occationally getting help from Seattle web designer colleagues when I was not available to do the work on my own.

For those familiar with WordPress, the customizations were developing a custom theme, custom post types, custom plugins, javascript actions, and css stylesheets. This is one of those projects where there is arguably no other platform that could have been used. WordPress’ original blogging platform became something much bigger than what it originally was. It became a modular system that allowed you to duplicate the blogging UI and turn it into anything else (an events calendar, a member group, a portfolio, a shopping cart, etc…) I thank everyone at the Northwest Dharma Association for providing me with such a challenging product. It forced me to learn WordPress far, wide, and deep.

Northwest Dharma News is an biannual online magazine covering buddhism in the Pacific Northwest

Today, my work for the Northwest Dharma Association is mostly maintenance. This is what happens after a design and user experience has stabilized. Because of the site’s complexity, there is always maintenance to be done. When WordPress, WordPress plugins, server PHP, Javascript, and other technologies are always updating, components break and need to be updated. Another ongoing job I have to do for NWDA is their Northwest Dharma News. With Steven Wilhelm as editor, I have the biannual responsibility of producing the News which involves modifying and adding to the code to create the new issues, and producing all the new articles for each issue.

Client Showcase: Musicians’ Association of Seattle

Posted on by Stephen

The Musicians’ Association of Seattle was my first client who hired me for web design. I am so grateful to this Musicians’ Union for all the work they have provided me over the years! This makes them my longest web client—2007 to present (even before I started Schildbach Design in 2008).

This was a large branding project for one person. Because, in addition to creating their logo and website, I had a number of print collateral and online marketing advertisements to do for them throughout the years. We also have gone through two complete website redesigns.

Musicland print and pdf for Musicicians’ Association of Seattle members

I had to push the WordPress platform to it’s fullest with many custom components—a custom WordPress theme, custom plugins, and custom post types. The custom post types were made for the events area, the members area, the performance area, and the instructors area. There is also a members only area which the WordPress platform helps with, but I still had to develop custom components to this password protected area.

Almost 15 years of projects:

  • Logo design
  • WordPress website (password protected, custom theme, custom plugins, custom post types)
  • Print collateral
  • Print advertising
  • Poster design
  • Brochure design
  • Musicland newsletter
  • Illustration

Family Photographer, Anita Nowacka

Posted on by Stephen

One of the most rewarding kinds of projects is when a creative person commissions me to design a custom website in WordPress for them. This September, my client Anita Nowacka launched her new website that I custom coded and developed in WordPress (design by Deborah Brown). As a family photographer in Seattle, she has an extensive, experienced career of photographing families. I highly recommend you contact Anita if your family is wanting spontaneous session photos of your family.

Family of Six, Anita Nowacka Photography

Web Designers have taken a hard hit financially from website builder services like Squarespace and Wix. But, Anita knew that there still is value in the custom website and commissioning of a web designer who both codes and designs. I was able to provide for her a home scroll page, slideshows and portfolios that don’t look like every other website you see. She approaches her photography in a similar way that I approach my work—no cookie cutter work, a unique project for every client. In these days of so much design work coming from a template, it is becoming rare to find creativity that doesn’t come from a premeditated formula. Anita, will create a photo session that is unique to your family. You will soon notice her experience, attention to detail and hard work is what produces family photographs that will capture your family in ways you never imagined.

Images copyright, Anita Nowacka