Chung Oh’s School of Tae Kwon Do

Arguably the first school of Tae Kwon Do in Ontario, the Chung Oh school was established in the spring of 1973 in Kitchener, Ontario. There are several branch schools across the region of Southwestern Ontario. This website is intended to serve the Windsor headquarters and its branch locations throughout Essex county, all under the watchful eye of Master Thomas Oh.

How we serve Master Oh

Website Design & Development

The intention for this web presence is to help visitors understand the Korean martial art a little more, and provide information about branch locations, schedules, and fees. It also serves the current students by housing messages regarding upcoming belt testing dates, tournaments, and community demonstrations.
Built on the WordPress engine, and W3C compliant to validate for XHTML 1.0 Strict, and CSS level 2.1.
Having said that, there is a dash of CSS3 involved in this website, though the specification is potentially years in the future from becoming the standard. It doesn’t break the site, but rather makes the experience a little richer in modern compliant browsers.


We’ve also involved child-themes in this build, taking advantage of what WordPress can do. The main landing page for this website, as well as most sub-pages are done in black tones. A handful of extra style sheets were coded, however, so that the main navigation will bring you through the belt colours in the Tae Kwon Do system. Each link going from left to right (besides the “Free Trial” link, which is done in the main style of black) offer colour palettes based on the belt progression in this martial art.
How much fun is it when a client gives you free reign! A healthy, yet unobtrusive amount of jQuery, conscientious typography, and crisp, clean navigation makes this website perhaps Windsor’s most professional and beautiful martial arts website…dare we say it ourselves.

Image Cropping, Resizing, and Optimization

Parents within this organization are generous enough to provide the pictures they take at demonstrations and other events. We make sure to take the best among them, and include them in the sidebar, as well as in the masthead jQuery slider.

The Canadian Wine Trail

The Canadian Wine Trail represents the headquarters for Canada’s oldest and largest wine competition, the All Canadian Wine Championships. The 2010 edition marks a banner year for the ACWC, having hosted 1,143 entries, with wines entered literally from coast to coast.

How we help this hub for oenophiles

Website Design & Development

As it happened with the previous incarnation of The Canadian Wine Trail, 2002 called and wanted its web design back. That’s just to say that it was a table-based layout using an out-of-the-box template with a color palette that followed no discernible design principles.

We sprinkled the home page with a little jQuery fade-transition behavioural sexiness, some typography (yes, it’s worth mentioning that the previous website used only one sans-serif font everywhere, with no line-height or spacing variations), and built the site on the WordPress engine, making it W3C compliant to validate for XHTML 1.0 Transitional, and CSS level 2.1. Having moved this website into a CMS, the client has been allowed some control over content updates, but more importantly, it’s now far more possible to honour the client’s original intention to make this website more of a wine community.

Brews & Cues

Brews & Cues is all about exactly what you’d think it’s about. You can enjoy some of their Ontario Craft Brewery selections on tap while enjoying a game of billiards on one of their fourteen tables. They also offer a full menu of tasty treats seven days a week.

How we help this pool hall

Website Design & Development

As the story so often goes with our clients, this website’s predecessor was a table-based layout provided by their hosting company that left little room for customization. Beyond that, search engine optimization was a concern as the site brought nearly no traffic.
The new website is in its infancy, so there’s not a lot to report yet as to what this new site has brought in increased traffic, but our experience tells us that it’ll eclipse the old one.
Built on the WordPress engine, and W3C compliant to validate for XHTML 1.0 Strict, and CSS level 2.1.

Email Marketing

There’s more to what the website is doing for them now. It’s also a tool through which they keep their customers in the know. By integrating an email marketing campaign that includes segmenting their list, they’re able to communicate with their subscribers in regards to only what they actually want to read about.

Consulting

Given my 20+ years in the restaurant industry, and some marketing savvy, I also consult from time to time on certain menu, staffing, and customer experience strategies.

Smoke & Spice Southern Barbeque

Smoke & Spice Southern Barbeque opened in September of 2008, at 1515 Ottawa Street in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. It features a “niche” product for this area, as no restaurant in Windsor features this unique style of cuisine. Good Egg Design created the bulk of the restaurant’s in-house print marketing materials, including their logo, menus for dine-in, take-out, and kids’ menus, business cards, and comment cards.

How we help this barbeque joint

Website Design & Development

SmokenSpice(dot)com was designed to feel as warm and inviting as the restaurant. The colour palette was chosen from photo samples of the actual interior, and of course, was created to be W3C compliant to validate for XHTML 1.0 Transitional, and CSS level 2.1. Yes, if you put the site through the validator, you will find 4 CSS “errors”. These were implemented quite purposely to take advantage of the proprietary rounded corner feature for some browsers to display on buttons used on the menu page. Though they show up as errors, the page doesn’t break in browsers that don’t support the feature. Instead, the buttons just have 90 degree corners rather than being rounded.

Logo Design

Restaurant folks are often real “hands-on” people, and the Odettes are no different. Ryan had very specific ideas about the “feel” he wanted in a logo, and it was centered around a particular font. He didn’t know what that font was at the time, because it was something he could only see in his head. We went through dozens (maybe even more that a hundred) before finding one that best matched what he imagined. We added a colour gradient, and a logo was born. Logos don’t get a lot more simple than the business name etched in a particular font, and for this client, it clicked.

Email Marketing

Owners Ryan & Tina Odette host a “VIP Birthday Club” on their website which serves to market to regular customers via email. Good Egg Design manages their list of thousands, and sends periodic marketing blasts to the list that keep folks aware of what’s new, and often involves a special offer.

Menus

We created the dine-in, take-out, and kid’s menus.

Business Cards, and Comment Cards

Hand-to-hand materials were created and sent to print. Comment Cards serve to provide the owners valuable input from their guests and double as “opt-in” forms for the “VIP Birthday Club”. The business cards are being revamped, and should go into circulation within weeks.

Storefront Signage

Developed design for storefront signage, and sent the files to sign company. Subsequently, we visited the office of that company’s graphic designer to assist with the final layout.

Festival Banner

We created a twenty-foot by two-foot banner for display at the “Festival Epicure”, and Windsor’s “Bluesfest”.

shu shu’

Boasting fashions that can’t be found anywhere even close to Windsor, Ontario, shu shu’ provides its customers with fashions that they’re not likely to see on anyone else when they step out. Owners and sisters, Sandra Lefeve, and Monica Brotto, decided that they wanted a bit of a facelift for the site they’ve had since opening in 2004. They sought a website redesign, and specifically wanted their customers to be able to view their product line without the big image load times they were experiencing. We implemented a solution that uses online image hosting by “flickr”.

How we help this fashion boutique

Website Design & Development

Some javascript and image resizing solved the issue of an online gallery, and now the product line is easily viewable on the slick and sexy new site. The website was coded to validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional, and CSS level 2.1, although shows errors beyond our control when put through the validator. This site was already being hosted by Yahoo, and still is. Unfortunately, the javascript automatically injected by Yahoo for geo-targeting has a bunch of errors involved, but luckily doesn’t actually break the page.

Image Cropping, Resizing, and Optimization

As the seasons change, so too do the fashions at shu shu’. When new photos are furnished by the owners, we crop and resize them, and alter the javascript to reflect the presence of new gallery photos.

Dr. Andrew Rak

Dr. Andrew Rak is located in East Windsor, Ontario, Canada, at 7106 Wyandotte Street East. In many ways, he’s a web designer’s dream. He came to us with very definite ideas about what he wanted in a website. He even had sketches in hand!

His office is accepting new patients, and besides being meticulous in his profession as well, he’s a real nice fella. If you’re as terrified of dentists as we are, this is your guy. He’s got a real knack for giving people the “warm and fuzzies” that we consider so important.

How we help this dentist

Website Design & Development

It’s rare that a client is able to be as specific about what they would like as Andrew Rak was, but with copy, photos, and ideas at the ready, it was just a matter of actively listening to him describe his vision, then execute it to the best of our ability.

It’s probably a little inaccurate to have the word “Design” in this heading, given that the Doc had pretty much taken care of that on paper, but this website represents good collaboration between a client and an egghead. Through good communication we were able to take the ideas that Dr. Rak came to us with and make them appear on a webpage. We’re pleased to report that he’s just smitten with the results.

This website is a table-based design, a practice that we have become vehemently opposed to, so the development of this site is slated to be redone and hand-coded from scratch to be W3C web standards-compliant. We’ll be taking care of that on our time and on our dime.

REDSQUAD Gaming

This group of people has been gaming together online through their PC’s for years, beginning with the “Medal of Honor: Allied Assault” game released in January of 2002. Though now relatively inactive, members still visit the forums area to say hello from time to time.

How we help this online gaming clan (side project)

Website Design & Development

Given that this site revolves around membership, a custom CMS built on the “e107″ engine was employed on this project. It allows for numerous administrators to manage content and members. As well, sidebar widgets can be activated or deactivated as necessary.

The [RSQ] site was coded to be 100% standards-compliant. Given the number of videos on the site, however, putting a page through the validator shows dozens of errors. The stock code for embedding video provided by YouTube is unfortunately non-compliant, but the page doesn’t break.

Logo Design

Using colours and symbols that have specific significance in heraldry, a logo was created as a coat of arms. A flag for the organization was created as well using some of the same heraldry references.

Mamo Bistro

Though it was located in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, Mamo Bistro boasted four stars for food and service from Detroit Michigan’s “Metro Times”. This contemporary bistro also received acclaim from the “Detroit News”, and WindsorEats.com. It represented Chef Ryan Odette’s first foray into the world of restaurant ownership.

How we helped this quaint bistro

Website Design & Development

The restaurant is now closed, but this website, with its varied and bright colour palette, was a good online visual representation of the seasonally based cuisine at this fine bistro. This design took advantage of 100% of a site visitor’s screen, and typography was kept to no more than two different fonts, one of which was included in the the logo designed by David Odette.