Brendan Ryan

Brendan Ryan - Added portfolio item

Liquid Adventures, a watersports and adventure company based in Seward, Alaska needed a stronger online web presence. Their trips are amazing combinations of expert guiding and breathtaking scenery, and they wanted a website that could help get the word out. Their former website was a Flash-based piece that looked nice and had some cool effects, but was effectively invisible to the search engines, costly to maintain, unreadable on mobile devices and slow to get updated. For this initial redesign, we worked together to translate much of the content and visual language of the former website to a new, SEO friendly HTML and CSS website that is based on the Drupal platform. Now, Liquid Adventures can add and delete tours at their leisure, change the photographs on the website with the click of a button, and hone their content strategically for the search engines.

Over 30 days ago - Like

Brendan Ryan - Added portfolio item

Schrader and Companies is a Minneapolis-based company that specializes in custom home building and unique remodeling projects. Run by designer and owner, Andy Schrader, the company routinely produces award winning building and design projects in the Twin Cities. Andy contacted me because he wanted his company to have the ability to update their own website frequently with news about the business' projects and media exposure. His former website was visually dated and difficult to maintain. I worked with Andy to create a website that could showcase the beautiful work that Schrader & Companies creates, and best of all, the site is centered around a content-management system so his staff can maintain it now. Every time Schrader & Companies completes a new project, gets an award or a feature in a magazine, or participates in a design fair, they can update their website so that all their former, current, and future clients can see what the company has been busy with.

Over 30 days ago - Like

Brendan Ryan - Added portfolio item

Exit Glacier Guides is a small climbing shop in Seward, Alaska that focuses on guided tours of glaciers in the area. In its current iteration, the website uses a nontraditional design strategy to grab visitors attention. When visiting the website, the viewer's monitor is dominated by a huge slideshow with fading transitions. Exit Glacier Guides felt like the imagery from Ice Hiking and Ice Climbing trips is so powerful that it should be the focus of the entire website. The concept appears to work. Each year, the traffic on the site increases, as do the amount of trips booked directly from the website. The company also routinely hears clients say that the website was the main factor that motivated them to book a trip with Exit Glacier Guides rather than with another company. Like most of the websites I design, the website is set up on a Drupal content-management platform so that multiple people can maintain the website and add to the site's blog.

Over 30 days ago - Like