Reclaiming Ritual is a Philadelphia-based exploration of Jewish meaning-making through warm, personal and bespoke ritual. The site, therefore, had to be warm and informational. It did not, however, need to be complicated. I hand-coded this one instead of going with WordPress because it didn't need all the bells and whistles. No blog posts, no complex media management. Just good old fashioned information with a contact at the bottom. Easy.

Rachelmillnertherapy.com

Rachel Millner is an amazing practitioner, a powerful activist, and a wonderful human being - so when the opportunity presented itself to build her a fresh website I jumped at the chance. 

Our goal was to build something that captured the welcoming energy of her and her practice while establishing a clear and powerful SEO presence for her that would allow her to continue to expand into the future. That translated into a bright, airy design that utilizes white space and gentle greens and blues to soften the edges of the text, as well as subtly tinting all of the grey tones with a touch of blue to tie it all together. 

Rachel and I worked hard to  prioritize the information potential clients would look for first and de-prioritize pages like the privacy policy that, while important, are not the first thing anybody wants to click on when they first arrive. This more structured presentation and thoughtful curation of the flow of information allowed for a more focused layout and clearer design choices that smoothed the user experience.

collingscats.com

This cat blog is just the best. My wife and I used to foster cats, and we wanted a place to both hype them up pre-adoption and also to centrally collect updates from their new families post-adoption. Is it any surprise that I decided to build them a blog?

What I learned from this project was that if you want repeat traffic, you have to have a hook. For the kitties, that was the embedded live feed on the homepage. I set a cheap webcam near their food bowl, and wouldn't you know it but people were absolutely hooked. We got a lot of outreach from potential adopters who had simply fallen in love with the kitties from watching them and couldn't wait to meet in person. We also established credibility and that warm-and-fuzzy vibe early on by tracking all of our kitties long after they were adopted. This long tail of follow-ups really helped solidify that we were a loving, involved foster home and not some grey-market kitten mill. That credibility helped many lovely kittens find happy homes.

AAASCO.com

AAA Service Company is a somewhat unique business. As a mid-sized demolition company in a rapidly developing market, every customer signed is possibly worth tens of thousands of dollars, and traffic numbers that would be miniscule in some settings can add up to millions of dollars in revenue. That places very high value on user experience – every customer who bounces off of a landing page represents potentially thousands of dollars lost.

Many customers were also regular homeowners suffering after a storm or a flood, this was also the first and last time they would have to interact with a demolition company. As Director of Marketing for AAA, a big part of my job was to ensure they felt safe with us. A lot of work went into understanding our customers' questions and designing the flow of the site to answer them before they even knew to ask. Doing that legwork for them emphasized our commitment to their experience of the process, not just to the outcome.

I attacked the bounce rate for our site through relentless A/B testing with Google Optimize, driving it to 7% below the industry average at the time of my departure. One of my signature flourishes that separated the site from a simple business listing is the active and vibrant “Completed Projects” blog, where I crafted engaging, narrative, locally-targeted content across multiple social media channels to drive web traffic and brand awareness. I also scored a major Local SEO coup by embedding relevant location data in every blog post and then tying them back to our Service Area pages. This strategy of internal linking and aggressive keywording paid dividends in the "demolition company near me" race, driving average daily impressions to nearly triple while also doubling CTR during my tenure.