We just finished Nate’s new site.  See it at natewhitlow.com.  We are currently working on 2 more projects we hope to announce soon.

The Space is a small bar in Salem, Oregon opened by an old friend of mine named Doug Hoffman just over two years ago. He’s built the business with a focus on live music, supporting local and independent musicians. I was really excited when he asked me to build him a new website to help promote the venue and publicize upcoming shows. The site has now been live for several months and I’m really pleased with how it turned out. One more example in our growing portfolio!

-Brad Grenz

That’s right half off our already low price of $1000.  So all track website redesigns or creations are only $500.00.

What is different about us? We believe in dynamic instead of static websites.  We make your website compatible to send and receive broadcast from other sites.  This allows all of your updates to be broadcast on any site who subscribes.  We automatically link all websites we create to the nwmoto.com network.  This allows your site to broadcast updates to the whole of the Northwest.  In our research we have found that the top referring websites to tracks on our network are other tracks through nwmoto.com news feeds.  We also set up your schedule page to broadcast as well.   This allows subscribers to have your schedule on their browser, website and blog.  Check out our current clients and feel free to ask anyone of them about our service.  Email me at whare83@hotmail.com or call at 503-339-7668.

Okay since our last post 5 months ago…
We have started the portal site

and a whole bunch of stuff I can’t remember.

We are just finishing the site

These  have both been fun projects for me.  I love getting to talk motocross all day long.

Motocross is like my golf in the business world.  So if you need some web work lets go ride and we can discuss it between motos.

We will be updating this page more often because we have all kinds of news coming up.  We have also decided to show our prototypes to show people what we are currently working on.

See You at the Track

Wes 83

In the time since we launched the Promoto Promotions site we’ve had a few different projects on tap.

First, we created a new website for Gran Prix Cycle, a bike shop located in Albany, Oregon. We’re really proud of how it turned out. I think it’s a good example of what we can do for that kind of business. In addition to the basics like directions, photos and contact information, we embedded a view of their current inventory through a third party service they were already using.

I’ve also been working on a couple personal projects. The first is a blog I’ve created to house the Secret History of Indie Music. Basically, over the years I’ve had occasion to write these fictional band biographies for local musicians and friends. People seemed to enjoy them, but I never had a good place to put them. I don’t anticipate the site being updated all that frequently, if only because these things are pretty challenging to write. I basically wait for the inspiration to come for a particular band before I even try to start writing. As such, the magazine style design is a good choice for the site. And being the internet it’s also really easy to include photos of the bands along with MP3s of their music.

My newest project is called Gamer Blahhhg. It’s just a few days old yet, but I created it to be a satirical take on the videogame blogosphere. I’m still working on developing a voice for the site, but it’s fun to write for. Once I register a domain name for the blog I can start promoting it in earnest.

I mentioned the deal in my last post, but we were able to get the new site for Promoto Promotions up and running over the weekend. Jason Merritt, the previous webmaster, was helpful in getting the full server access I needed and after that it was a matter of feverishly bringing the new design online.

I did end up going through a few different header image designs. When we initially prototyped the site I knocked together a quick example logo that looked like this:

But Elaine, who own Promoto, provided an official logo which is pretty cool. She had an older design with a similar aesthetic, but the bike itself in that image was really old school. The newer version reflects modern bike design. I at first tried it on a panoramic image I stiched together from some old shots of a race:

Unfortunately because I didn’t want to cover up the racers on the track I had to place the logo to the right and it didn’t look to good. Next I tried flipping the photo, changing it to black and white and adding a gradient effect to blend in the logo:

But this still didn’t make me happy. I had been trying to reserve some of the space to the right of the header image for ad placement, but I eventually gave up on that and commited to a full width image, something I thought would simply look nicer. The final design simply overlaid a cool panoramic image salvaged from the old site with the logo simply overlaid to the left:

Doesn’t look like much shrunk down here, so visit the new site to see it in all its glory!

I spent most of Monday this week on the road with Wesley meeting with new and existing clients. We managed to sign a deal with Elaine of Promoto Promotions to take over the site for her track. That will be our next big project. Right now we’re waiting for a data drop and access to the existing servers, but I hope we’ll have another great site to show off soon.

Also made a point of visiting an advertising client who Wesley had been meaning to check back with again for a while but could not because of his injury. It was a good 3+ hours in the car and I think he was a bit wore out by the end. I was suffering from a lack of sleep by the end there, too.

Still, a very productive day for us. We’ve got money coming in and the Promoto deal should go a long way to solidify our plans to create a network of track sites with which to promote the sport and sell advertising on.

I am testing some of the capabilities of the NexGEN Flashviewer plugin for Wordpress. To that end I’ve created a new gallery of my own photography from the last 3 years, or so.

Wes was injured racing motocross last weekend. He had surgery to place a pin in his broken femur Saturday and is having surgery again today on his broken wrist. He seems to be doing a lot better than that sounds, though. Between naps this week he was able to close another advertizing deal for AlbanyMX.com and was in good spirits last night when I went to hang out with him and my sister.

On my end I’ve spent the week whipping the Ranch Records site into better shap behind the scenes. I got the shopping cart system up and running, including testing through paypal. I also went through every page to optimize it for search engines. I busied myself backing up all our sites, including the all important databases.

The Ranch site is very near the point of being ready to go live. I’m just waiting on a few actions from the client and we’ll be able to set it to appear in search engines and start promoting its launch.

This site is looking pretty good as well. I’ve customized the theme to my liking and put up a temporary logo. It’s very simply, but it actually looks pretty nice. I do have Diane working on a logo design as well.

Welcome to Day One. Day One, that is, unless you count all the days back to the week between Christmas and New Years where this all started. It was then Wes and I began our partnership in earnest, launching the new AlbanyMX.com in early January. This is actually the second version of the site we’ve had a hand in. Ten years ago we designed another site for what was then Albany Supercross, but we were a little ahead of our time and the effort never bore fruit. Fast forward to today and the site is a nice success.

That initial success has led to what you see today. We had not really set out to start a web design firm, but we were seeing so much interest from the companies we talked to about advertizing on that site in our availability for further design work we had to rethink everything.

Almost six months and a number of clients later we’ve settled on a name for the web side of our business, Dirigible Web Design, and I’m working on this site to showcase our talents. Things will be in flux for a while as I adapt and change things to our liking, and hack out pieces of code that cause problems. So stay tuned!