Canton Becker » Portfolio

Breathe Free Tibet

Canton — Mon, 30 May 2011 17:55:47 +0000

Every year, I agree to build one or two non-profit websites at a discounted rate. This year, I was especially honored to be given the opportunity to design and launch BreatheFreeTibet.org. The purpose of this organization is to “save an ancient culture from extinction” by improving health care available to Tibetans in exile. This population suffers from one of the highest rates of tuberculosis in the world.

Please consider making a donation to this organization, whose fundraising is conducted by The Tibet Fund (a four star charity as rated by Charity Navigator) and whose mission is personally endorsed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama of Tibet.

www.breathefreetibet.org

Website Redesign for Unity Woods Yoga

Canton — Mon, 30 May 2011 17:25:14 +0000

Unity Woods Yoga hired me to design and build a modern website for their four yoga studio locations in the Washington DC area. The client is able to edit 100% of the pages on the website using WordPress, including all homepage content, instructor bios and the blog. Additionally, class schedules are automatically synchronized to a 3rd party yoga class registration web service via XML and attractively rendered using AJAX for super-speedy navigation.

www.unitywoods.com

“I engaged Canton for a complete redesign of the website for Unity Woods Yoga. It’s hard to know what to praise first. His expert technical knowledge of WordPress and his creative design advice made the site far more attractive and user-friendly than before. His skill in automating a connection to the studio’s online registration system will save the staff many hours of work each month. I especially appreciate the value he consistently added above and beyond my expectations with extra tweaks and improvements that I didn’t even know to ask for.”

– Sue Lyn Schramm
Marketing / Outreach for Unity Woods

Website & blog redesign for Round Mountain

Canton — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 15:41:56 +0000

Round Mountain is a “Two man singing folk orchestra” based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. When musicians Char and Robby Rothschild received a last-minute invitation to play at the Folk Alliance conference in Memphis, they asked me for an emergency meeting to see if it would be possible to build them a brand new website in short order. The website you see below was designed and built in 10 hours using “The Station” WordPress theme as a starting point.

Highlights from this marathon design session included:

Creating the two minute promotional video featured on the home page
Because a good video is essential for promoting a band
Automatically importing over six years of blog posts from blogger.com
Because splitting your content across 2 sites hurts your Google ranking
Promoting Facebook and newsletter signups (via iContact)
Because having a website is not enough: you need to ‘push’ your news to your audience because they may not return to your website on their own

www.RoundMountainMusic.com

The Asia Foundation wins Non-Profit Standard of Excellence Award

Canton — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 14:56:03 +0000

Our work helped The Asia Foundation earn a prestigious Non-Profit Standard of Excellence Award in the 2010 Web Marketing Association WebAwards. Congratulations to the asiafoundation.org web team including David Hirschi, Donovan Watts, and Keith Mitchell. It’s notable that most of this award-winning design work was completed almost three years ago, proving that our work remains relevant and fresh long after launch-date.

This website is powered by our custom CMS which allows Asia Foundation staff to edit virtually every page of the website without any special tools. Certain areas of the website are seamlessly integrated with WordPress, YouTube, and SlideShowPro to take advantage of these industry-leading tools for news, video, and photo publishing.

Podcasting website for Future Primitive

Canton — Thu, 06 May 2010 02:19:57 +0000

Joanna Harcourt-Smith has been recording her interviews with visionaries and innovators for almost five years, so the most important part of this website redesign was to reorganize her 150+ recordings into topics and collections using WordPress. This also presented the opportunity to create a striking graphic design and logo to reflect the earthy and ambitious spirit of the project.

www.FuturePrimitive.org

To extend the reach and audience for FuturePrimitive.org, the website is now connected to Facebook, Twitter and Feedburner (email) so that followers are automatically notified whenever a new episode is broadcast. Furthermore, fans can embed individual episodes as streaming audio widgets on their own websites by copying and pasting a single line of code (as is done with YouTube videos). For example, the episode you see below was embedded by inserting this single line of code:

Website redesign for MMD France: MindManager experts

Canton — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 22:15:55 +0000

This project involved redeploying an extensive static HTML site as a WordPress site with a brand new look and feel. MMD France is made up of a team of experts in MindManager, software used for “Mind Mapping” ideas.

www.mmdfrance.fr

To distinguish MMD from its competition, the goals for this redesign included:

Becoming content-driven: Focusing attention on MMD’s 10 years of expertise by deploying a blog made up of tutorial videos, tips, and free “maps” for download
Making the human connection: Demonstrating that MMD is operated by real and approachable people with unequaled experience in their field.
Simplifying content management: Using WordPress, MMD can easily update nearly 100% of their website content using a web browser. Adding new training videos or products takes minutes.

Website for Earth Treasure Vase

Canton — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 18:20:25 +0000

For Thanksgiving Day 2009, the official website for the Earth Treasure Vase Global Healing Project was completed and published. Visit EarthTreasureVase.org to see how this interesting and profound spiritual practice was illuminated using an unusual circular introductory video and an interactive geo-tagged google map.

This site is 100% WordPress powered, meaning that as new Earth Treasure Vases are buried, the client can edit the content, photos, videos etc. without assistance.

www.EarthTreasureVase.org

Website for “under the rose”

Canton — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:25:44 +0000

Today I designed and donated a simple website to launch under the rose, an album featuring master oud player Rajim AlHaj and nouveau flamenco pioneer Ottmar Liebert. The musicians who recorded this album are giving it away for free in support of Direct Aid Iraq.

Click above to listen to under the rose

Website for Green Psychology

Canton — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 18:27:43 +0000

This website was designed for Jake and Hannah Eagle, co-founders of Green Psychology™. The content management system for this site is based on WordPress so that the client can easily update web pages, articles, and hosted discussions.

www.GreenPsychology.net

Using free WordPress templates for fast & affordable redesigns

Canton — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:30:37 +0000

Here are two beautiful, highly functional, self-editable websites that were launched on shoestring budgets by making good use of off-the-shelf WordPress templates:

Deva Foundation

www.deva.org

I started off with this freely available WP theme. Then my client found a nice stock image of clouds on iStockPhoto.com that I converted into an ephemeral background. Finally, I popped in a new header graphic, improved the font styling (and IE compatibility) and integrated iContact for email newsletter signups and and PayPal for ecommerce.

Ta-da! Deva Foundation’s brand new site was completed in less than 20 hours, from concept to completion.

Maria Benitez

www.MariaBenitez.com

This website for the legendary Santa Fe flamenco dancer Maria Benitez was completed in even less time by taking advantage of the excellent — and freely available – “Yoghourt” WordPress theme.

Flash Site for GCI

Canton — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 03:09:04 +0000

Working from Illustrator mockups (graphic design by avantgarde) this 100% Flash site was built with gorgeous full-screen portfolios, custom text and photo scrolling classes and efficient loading / pre-loading behaviors.

www.gci-sf.com

GCI is a succesful San Francisco based commercial contracting / construction management firm.

Prototyping for PayPal

Canton — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 03:55:34 +0000

I really enjoy doing rapid prototyping, and from a business perspective there’s no better way to figure out how to bring a new product to market. This month, AnswerLab (San Francisco) hired me to produce web prototypes to test a new financial product for PayPal.

Here’s how this type of study works:

Figure out what different messages or images you think might help to sell your product
Produce a prototype (fake) website that simulates purchasing that product, with variations for each message or image you want to test
Send users to test out each variant of the website
Conduct statistical analysis of users’ browsing behaviors to figure out which variation produced the best results

Being With Dying

Canton — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 18:21:49 +0000

Today we launched this simple elegant website to promote Upaya’s enormously important “Being With Dying” training program:

www.BeingWithDying.org

“The professional Training Program in Contemplative End-of-Life Care has long been dedicated to fostering a revolution in care of the dying. This unique program provides clinicians with essential tools for taking care of dying people with skill and compassion, as well as sustaining resilience and dedication as they serve others.”

Ottmar Liebert’s Redesign

Canton — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 21:44:09 +0000

The last time I did a complete redesign for platinum-selling flamenco guitarist Ottmar Liebert was in 1995. By 2008, he was ready for something new and fresh, something that pushed the envelope while staying rooted with his zen-sensibility for elegant, clean, functional design.

The jewel of this redesign is a environmentally sensitive home page which, if left alone for 10 minutes, gets devoured by weeds, vines, bugs…

This fairly huge project included:

SEO-friendly flash
A wordpress diary that goes back 12 years
A record label
An MP3 downloads shopping cart.

http://ottmarliebert.com

Wedding Photography Blog Redesign

Canton — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 15:59:50 +0000

http://henshallphoto.com

This was a super-basic blog redesign for a friend and former colleague of mine. The assignment was to create a look and feel that kept his existing branding requirements (color pallette, logo) while making a new frame for his blog that would provide an elegant relief for large animated photo slideshows and sparse text.

Beauty Through Balance

Canton — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 21:13:10 +0000

www.BeautyThroughBalance.com was designed and built for Shannon Plummer, the sole proprietor of a holistic health and beauty business in Santa Fe. Her new site was built using WordPress so that Shannon could easily update the site on her own. For example, she uses WordPress to add the health tip of the month. Visitors and customers can sign up for Shannon’s mailing list which automatically emails the content each tip of the month as it’s published.

http://beautythroughbalance.com

“I had the most wonderful experience working with Canton. He made designing my website fun and very easy. From our very first meeting, the entire process was quick, and understandable. During our work together, he taught me how to manage my website on my own which is so important for my small business.

Canton is such a great mix of many different qualities; he’s very technical, a great designer, easy to talk with and a wonderful teacher of his craft. I highly recommend his expertise to anyone!”

– Shannon Plummer, DOM

Redesign for The Greenlining Institute

Canton — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 22:42:05 +0000

greenlining.org

I’m very pleased to announce the redesign and redeployment of greenlining.org.

Associate Director Orson Aguilar at Greenlining hired me to make a brand new website, following a look and feel sketched out by their designer. They needed a customized content management system that would make it easy for them to update their news, videos, publications, and policy initiatives. Everything needed to be database-driven, from the home page to the staff list to the news area.

Highlights

Videos are automatically embedded and synchronized with content uploaded to YouTube™
Images and all other content on the website can be edited using a web browser. No need to photoshop images to scale or crop them, no need to create PDF previews. It’s all done on the fly.
PDFs, videos, and news articles are all tagged with the policy initiatives they relate to, so the policy pages stay fresh and up-to date whenever new content is added.
Seamless integration with PHPList for the ability to send email newsletters to 1000′s of subscribers.

About the Client

The Greenlining Institute’s mission is to empower communities of color and other disadvantaged groups through multi-ethnic economic and leadership development, civil rights and anti-redlining activities. They’ve made financial institutions like the Bank of America and Wells Fargo commit to investing over $900 billion (over 10 years) to help the communities they serve.

New Donations System for Upaya.org

Canton — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:02:31 +0000

The Challenge: The Upaya Institute relies on donations to support a variety of projects, and using PayPal for donations has turned out to be expensive and difficult to track. Upaya needs to be able quickly manage and prioritize a list of funds, and make it easier for donors to make contributions.

The Solution: We decided to replace Upaya’s PayPal donation button with a dynamic funds editor that deposits donations straight into a bank account. Donors can specify what funds they want to support, and Upaya’s accountant can easily see what donations have been made each day. Try it out on upaya.org.

[See post to watch Flash video]

This is a 3.5 minute tour of the public side of this system (for making donations) and the administrative side (for managing donation campaigns and retrieving results.)

Back At The Ranch Cowboy Boots

Canton — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 20:34:15 +0000

Click to Zoom

This design was for a vendor of high-end cowboy boots in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Each of the 100+ boots was professionally photographed from five different angles so visitors could thoroughly explore each item in the collection.

You can see how the design looked when it launched in 2006 in the video below.

[See post to watch Flash video]

This design job was commissioned and later implemented (and updated) by the folks at studio x.