Website portfolio

Building Nonprofit Websites in King County

Nonprofit youth mentoring website screenshot

A redesigned WordPress website for The 4C Coalition – a community-based nonprofit, founded in 1999, that helps black and other youth of color succeed in school and in life. The 4C Coalition offers one-on-one mentoring, group mentoring and tutoring to 12- to 17-year-olds in King County.

Scope of Work

content migration
copywriting
creative strategy
color palette development
front-end web development
online data management
performance optimization
security hardening
search engine optimization
visual design
WordPress training and consulting

Performance

Page load speed ranks in the top 15% of sites.

WebPageTest Speed Index: 1.737 (median = ~3.591; top 10% = <1.388)

Total Page File Size: 1.3 Mb (In 2020, the median web page size = ~2.1 MB; the average page size = ~2.4 Mb)
Total Web Server Requests: 48

Web Design Team

Content Strategy: Rita Cipalla
Photography: Rebecca Sullivan
Visual Design: Joan van den Berg
WordPress Theme Development: Scott Marlow

 

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Original Websites for Original Artists

musician-composer website

A redesigned WordPress website for musician-composer, Glenna Burmer. The new site merges content from burmermusic.com into a single domain for the award-winning artist. Visitors can listen and watch concert clips from SoundCloud and Vimeo. Stay tuned for the teaser trailer for the award-winning animated short film, Nana korobi, Ya oki.

The new website is simply FANTASTIC! Absolutely beautiful!
Glenna Burmer

Scope of Work

content migration
copywriting
creative strategy
color palette development
front-end web development
performance optimization
security hardening
search engine optimization
visual design
WordPress training and consulting

Performance

Page load speed ranks in the top 10% of sites.

Google Lighthouse benchmarks
Mobile Speed: 85/100
Desktop Speed: 97/100
Accessibility: 96/100
Best Practices:  100/100
Search Engine Optimization: 93/100

WebPageTest Speed Index: 1.169 (median = ~3.591; top 10% = <1.388)

Total Page File Size: 489 Kb (In 2020, the average page size was ~2.4 Mb; the median size was ~2.1 Mb)
Total Web Server Requests: 24 (4 Scripts + 5 Images + 6 CSS files + 4 fonts + 2 Other + 1 HTML )

Team

Content Strategy by: Rita Cipalla
Visual Design by: Joan van den Berg
Banner artwork: Descending Dragon by Nobu Burmer | Banner photo: Sakurajima volcano, Kyushu, Japan, by Glenna Burmer
WordPress Theme Development by: Scott Marlow

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Weebly to WordPress Website Redesign

SPiN Cafe screenshot

A redesigned website for SPiN Cafe, an Oak Harbor nonprofit serving people in need.

Our team collaborated with board members and the recently appointed executive director to build a new WordPress site that better reflects the organization’s brand identity, with clear messaging and simple calls-to-action. Page and Post content was migrated from the original Weebly site and reformatted into semantic, search engine-friendly HTML.

Our heartiest thanks to you and your team for designing our new web site. All of the SPiN board members are well-pleased with the design and choice of visuals and graphics, as well as the ease of navigating the site.
Mark Stroud, president
SPiN Cafe

Scope of Work

brand discovery
project management
content migration
copywriting
creative strategy
art direction
color palette development
front-end web development
performance optimization
security hardening
search engine optimization
visual design
WordPress training and consulting

Performance Analysis

Page load speed on the new WordPress site is significantly improved from the original Weebly site by reducing overall page size 64% and web server requests 66%.

Google Lighthouse benchmarks
Mobile Speed: 80/100
Desktop Speed: 92/100
Accessibility: 98/100
Best Practices:  93/100
Search Engine Optimization: 93/100

WebPageTest Speed Index: 2.675 (median = 3.519; top 10% = 1.388)

Total Page File Size: 675 Kb (In 2020, the average page size was ~2.4 Mb; the median size was ~2.1 Mb)
Total Web Server Requests: 30 (8 scripts + 8 images + 7 CSS + 1 HTML + 3 Fonts + 1 Other)

Team

Logo Design by: Theresa Dilley
Content Strategy by: Liz Gillespie
Branding and Visual Design by: Elise Cope
WordPress Theme Development by: Scott Marlow

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What Would WordPress Do?

City of Gig Harbor parks website

WordPress is the most popular Content Management System in the world. WordPress powers 42% of all websites; and 62% of CMS-powered sites.

But not all WordPress sites are created equal.

One of my favorite tasks is showing clients the benefits of open source technology. In particular, I enjoy demonstrating Core Web Vitals for open source WordPress Themes vs. cheap, popular paid commercial themes from vendors like ThemeForest. I primarily use Google Lighthouse to evaluate sites, but I also rely on Pingdom, WebPageTest and other benchmarking tools.

This latest nonprofit project for PenMet Parks in Gig Harbor involved rebuilding a commercial theme-powered WordPress site with my favorite Theme, _Underscores.

The client’s previous page load speed was atrocious, and the website crashed on a regular basis. Worse, content contributors could not even use the CMS to make the most basic content edits due to bloated Theme and Plugin features.

By following better WordPress and web standards, web server requests were reduced 69% and page size was reduced 73%. As a result of better web development practices, page load speed improved 78%. And the parks organization can now easily, intuitively edit all of their site content.

Scope of Work

accessibility testing
brand discovery
project management
content migration
copywriting
creative strategy
art direction
color palette development
front-end web development
performance optimization
security hardening
search engine optimization
visual design
WordPress training and consulting

Site Statistics

Performance Metric Old Website New Website
Google Lighthouse: Mobile Performance 3/100 67/100
Google Lighthouse: Desktop Performance 12/100 92/100
Google Lighthouse: Accessibility 97/100
Google Lighthouse: Best Practices 93/100
WebPageTest Speed Index 7.176 1.831
Total Homepage File Size
(In 2020, average page size was ~2.4 Mb; median size was ~2.1 Mb)		 4.5 Mb 1.2 Mb
Total Web Server Requests 194 61
Estimated Mobile Homepage Load Time ~7 seconds ~1.8 seconds

Team

Photography by Chrisy Dorsey
Visual Design by Heidi Grace
WordPress Theme Development by Scott Marlow

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Designing Seattle Websites Since 2005

Eagle Eye Painting screenshot

A rebuilt WordPress site for Eagle Eye Painting, a family-owned Seattle residential painting company.

This project involved cloning a commercial (paid) Theme Forest Theme (Salient) into a WordPress-approved open source Theme. Project goals were to improve performance, security, and content management. Plugins were consolidated and limited to simplify site management and improve page load speed. PHP 5.6 (deprecated in  December 2018) was upgraded to version 7.3 on the existing web host. By reducing overall page size 35% and web server requests 59% – page load speed improved 3 fold.

Salient’s  heavyweight Visual Composer editor was replaced by WordPress’ native Gutenberg Block Editor, customized and color-coordinated around the company’s existing brand identity. The painters can now more intuitively edit content and duplicate Portfolio template layouts to showcase new painting jobs.

Scott is the best! I highly recommend him. The “responsive” in his business name is no joke – he is lightning fast and not only knows his stuff but communicates clearly and patiently to boot. If you’re looking to replace frustration with competence and clarity, look no further than Marlow-Five-0.
Dianna Elam, office manager
Eagle Eye Painting, LLC

Scope of Work

Mobile Responsive Theming
Performance Optimization
Security Hardening
WordPress Training and Consulting

Google Lighthouse benchmarks
Mobile Page Load Speed: 84/100
Desktop Page Load Speed: 97/100
Accessibility: 100/100
Best Practices: 100/100
SEO: 93/100

WordPress Theming by: Scott Marlow

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