Successful websites give visitors the information they are looking for quickly. Elegant and clean lines give a website a great feel, but first and foremost, websites are about communication and content. The challenge of forming clarity in a website stems from the fact that as the complexity of the message rises, so must the structure of the website. What follows are examples of Timo's design execution. Look for how the websites carry their message and information with clarity and meaning.

Featured Sites

Louis McBride Design & Construction Inc.:
www.louismcbride.com

Customer Feedback:
"Still getting compliments on the site, once again, well done! Regards."

Challenge: Build a Flash based portfolio site with smooth transitions and streamlined loading to present a detailed and in-depth construction and design portfolio.

Solution:
Utilizing actionscript, dynamic loading techniques, and strong user interface considerations, a Flash site was designed from the ground up. The website focused on displaying the rich image galleries and information specific index pages. Working with Louis, the site went through many revisions on its way to the functional and very clean website it is. The simple flow between the sections took careful planning and coding for each detail.

Thomas Klope Associates, Inc. Landscape Architects:
www.klope.com

Customer Feedback:
"I'm on cloud nine having just seen the final rendition of our website. Susie and I just completed our final review and let us be the first to say how beautiful the site is and that it meets every goal that we set out to accomplish."

Challenge: Rebuild their website to match the clean sophistication of the landscape architecture firm.

Solution:
Over the course of several months, Timo worked with Klope associates to express the clarity they were looking for in a new website. The architects have a colorful and diverse body of work that they wanted to showcase. Eventualy Timo went to several of the their projects sites to shoot photos, so that every last detail of the website was crisp, and on message. This firm hits every detail for their clients, so their site had to show it, and does.

Monica Brown Children's Author:
www.monicabrown.net

Customer Feedback:
"I just sent these to my agent to get some 'objective' feedback, because my impression is purely WOW!!! I LOVE IT! I love the icons next to the links--SOOOOO creative! FAB FAB FAB--no one could do better. Thank you."

Challenge: Bring the wonderful world of Monica's children's books to an online audience.

Solution:
Finding inspiration in her colorful book illustrations, and working closely with Monica, the site grew organically like the magical stories Monica's award-winning children's books depict. The site is able to show the whole story of the books to a greater audience of parents, teachers, fellow authors, and book buyers. It does so in a way that the books cannot. The site offers up links, reference material, and descriptions, as well as profile information about the author. With the amazing content on hand, the real challenge was only to make sure nothing was left out, letting it shine on the web within the same style as the books.

R. J. Dailey Construction:
www.RJDailey.com

Customer Feedback:
"We wanted a website to showcase our unique custom homes but didn't know where to begin. Timo McIntosh was recommended to us, and we are very satisfied with the end product. Timo is easy to work with and provided us fast service. When we recently needed to update with new photos he was able to turn the work around in a day."

Challenge:Create an upscale website to demonstrate the upscale home building services R. J. Dailey Construction provides its clients.

Solution:
R. J. Dailey construction is a well known and high end home builder, and their work speaks for itself. With great clients and homes to show, the website didn't need to work to impress visitors. The website just needed to present what the images blasted to anyone who looked at them and what the magazine articles said. Using a modern and "black tie" design with a subdued yet classy color scheme, the website just screams with the quality that R. J. Dailey Construction puts into its work.

Larry Christiani Construction Inc.
www.christianiconstruction.com

Challenge: Christiani Construction builds estates. Their website has to be big and sharp. Every square foot of their projects gets master craftsman's treatment, so a website must show all that detail in style, and in a well organized way.

Solution:
The website shows images of details and grand views of their projects, without the clutter of categories and an unnatural hierarchy. When you show big projects, they need space and room to breath. The website, has a minimal feel, but is elegant and highlights only what needs to be said; the work is big and perfectly executed, period.

Duxbury Architects:
www.duxburyarchitects.com

Challenge: Show fantastically designed homes to potential clients.

Solution:
The web is an ideal form to show off images, because it is directed, accessible and vibrant. The images of the homes built by Duxbury Architects were taken by nationally acclaimed photographers and many are published in books that have been distributed world wide. Months of fine tuning and collaboration resulted is this awesomely simple world wide web site; designed to accentuate the high class and beauty of the homes built by the firm.

Spectrum Resources:
www.spectrum-resources.com

Challenge: Build an inviting and simple website that allows visitors to order services through a web form and be maintainable by Spectrum Resources itself.

Solution:
Meeting locally, Timo and Spectrum Resources fine tuned the idea of providing an order form within the scheme of the site design. Everything down to the images was hand chosen or specially shot on location to represent SR's clientele. Using XHTML, very little Javascript and little CSS, the site was put together to be in tune with the radio users who are Spectrum Resources' clients. The site is reminiscent of the FCC website and is fixed width to provide a clean and structured presentation.

DTB Econ Pages:
www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~dannytb/

Customer Feedback:
"The best part about working with Timo, was that he understood the artistic vision I wanted for the site and it was easy to work together with him to implement it."

Challenge: Produce a unique and chic college website to present this graduates student's work, in 3 days.

Solution:
In the matter of 3 short days, Timo and Dan sat down like they were cramming for a college test, to hammer this site out. It only needed to be a few pages and have minimal content in order to show this grad student's hard work to his colleagues. What resulted was a unique and crisp deign that shows the traveled, and well educated person in a take notice, and visually clean style.

Website Functionality and Content Examples

Trout Brook Farm:
www.thetroutbrookfarm.com (Archived Version)

Functionality and Content: Historic Photos, Dynamic Zoomable and clickable Maps, Property History.

Background:
Through the process of gathering the content for the website, Timo was able to connect with the property, and get a real sense of what the land was about. The property had been in the family for hundreds of years, and had all the traditions, and family history to go along with it. The site had to be more than a simple gallery of some old pictures. Anything less than a fully interactive virtual history tour wouldn't have done the property justice, so Timo put together maps, old photos, new images, interactive views, and text into a story that tells the full tale of the land, and its multi-generation family of owners.

This is a gem of a website that preserves the story of a historic land.

Vaso Azzurro:
www.vasoazzurro.com

Functionality and Content: Restaurant menus, and samples plates

Background:
The patrons of Vaso Azzurro enjoy the great food and drinks presented by the restaurant, as did the food critics of local newspapers. The site focused the users attention on the key elements of the restaurant; menu, reviews, images, directions and nothing else.

Third Millennium Redux:
www.jubal.com (release info N/A)

Functionality and Content: Completely overhaul an existing game code base from the database scheme to the html UI, to rid it of bugs, tie it into a more advanced user management system, and add 50% more functionality.

Background:
After a good month of coding and 2 weeks of designing the UI, the result was a game that could enter Beta testing. The original code base had sat for 3 years idle and incomplete. Timo, using all of his technical prowess, high level planning, and creative design skill whipped the game into a shape it had never seen. Putting the game on course to eminent release, Timo moved on to other projects.

Dardalani: the city of shadow:
www.jubal.com (release info N/A)

Functionality and Content: Build a web enabled role playing game (RPG) using the telnet based technology of a MUSH server, and increase the emersion and interface aspects of the game by adding images and simplifying the game play for accessibility.

Background:
"Dardalani: the city of shadows" is a web based multi person role playing game. It was a collaboration between the game designer, the back end MUSH architect and Timo, the front end, user interface and middle-ware programer. It was a part-time project for the 3 of us for over a year and we were nearing release when Timo stopped working on the project. The game will be available for play through Jubal Online inc. www.jubal.com

There was no budget on this, so it was a project of love rather than a business endeavour. As such we had more freedom to be creative. This was a double edge sword though. We had to be creative with our design to make it work since we didn't have the physical and human resources that most game shops have.

The game play is driven by a reworked MUSH running on Jubal servers, which enables the UI to interact with the normally telnet based MUSH. The UI is a combination of a FLASH 5 application and a communications daemon written in PERL. The overall design is modular and therefore not clean and simple, but it is all open source technology and can run on a cheap linux box with little more than PERL, apache and a c compiler.

WRQ:
wrq.artmachine.com (intranet)

Functionality and Content: Array of file formats, dynamic file chooser functionality.

Background:
A "logo dispenser" was built for WRQ. Using an idea from the creative staff, Timo, along with another programer, put together what they termed the "Super Logo Dispenser". Using a database, and a custom application to drive the web site, a decision tree was translated into html for the distribution of WRQ's logos. With the site, WRQ's clients didn't have to contact them for logos, they could just go to their "Super Logo Dispenser," and run through the decision tree to the logo they needed.

First Union E-Library:
www.firstunionelibrary.com (mothballed)

Functionality and Content: First Unions Bank's e-library of campaign files and images.

Background:
Using existing e-library code, developed in-house, a team consisting of Timo and a coder, migrated, redesigned and extended the original site to match the new advertising needs and look and feel. The whole site construction was accomplished in only a few days, yet maintained a high level of success.

Saturn E-Library:
www.saturnelibrary.com (mothballed)

Functionality and Content: Saturn's e-library of campaign files and images.

Background:
This site was pulled off back to back with the First Union site and was accomplished in much the same way. Although not as technically demanding, this site had more rigorous design challenges. Both sites challenged Timo's team both creatively and technically, but the team was able to step up to the challenge and succeed.