Nine builds,
taken apart

Two of these were structure problems wearing a web-design brief.

Rexburg-Madison Airport has three unrelated audiences arriving at one front door. Travelers want visitor information. Pilots want operational detail — fuel, services, runway and field information. Tenants and local businesses want something else again. None of them care about the other two, and all of them are annoyed by having to filter. Each audience got a short, clear path from the front page to what they came for, without the other two in the way.

Madisonhealth was a subtler version of the same thing. The site already worked in the narrow sense, but its structure followed the hospital's internal org chart, and patients arrive with a different set of questions entirely. Rebuilding the front end around wayfinding put provider search, departments and locations up front, out from behind a menu.

Core Web Vitals are easy to win on a fast desktop connection in a dev environment. That's not where Madisonhealth gets used.

It gets used on hospital wifi, on rural mobile connections across Eastern Idaho, on older devices, often one-handed by somebody who's stressed and looking for exactly one thing. The performance work targeted those conditions, not the ones that are convenient to test in, because a number that only holds on a developer's machine is a number that doesn't mean anything.

Madisonhealth is public-facing healthcare. It carries real obligations, and it serves people with visual, motor and cognitive impairments at a higher rate than the general population does.

Semantic structure, keyboard paths, contrast and focus order were part of the build, not a remediation pass bolted on at the end. The ordering is the whole point: accessibility retrofitted after the fact is more expensive, more fragile, and tends to produce a site that passes an audit without being pleasant to use.

Palos Verdes K9 was built from nothing into a crowded Southern California market. The entire site is structured around local search intent for the peninsula and the communities around it. For a service business with a physical catchment that structural call matters more than any amount of on-page tweaking afterwards — get it wrong and no volume of content fixes it later.

Sell My Land Fast is the inverse problem. Being nationwide removes the usual shortcut: a local business can rank in its town and be most of the way there, but with no service area to anchor to, the site has to earn attention on the strength of the offer and convert on the strength of the page.

Kardia Marketing needed architecture aimed at how medical practices search for marketing help, so the site brings in its own qualified traffic without leaning on outbound.

Palos Verdes K9 sells training and boarding packages, which is a comparison purchase. People want to weigh options side by side, not read three paragraphs and infer the difference — so the packages are laid out to be scanned and compared at a glance, with the distinctions made explicit. The calls to action sit next to the package someone is evaluating, not parked in a footer they reach after they have already talked themselves out of it.

Sell My Land Fast exists to earn exactly one action, with no secondary goal to hedge with. Every additional field on a lead form costs submissions, and on a page whose only purpose is that form, each one is expensive — so it asks for what's needed to make an offer and nothing else. Trust signals sit where the hesitation actually happens. A footer nobody scrolls to is decoration.

That build also had analytics wired in from day one. On a single-conversion site there's no excuse for not knowing exactly where people leave.

Mrs. Powell's Bakery was a redesign with live commerce underneath, which is harder than it looks. A brochure site can be rebuilt and swapped over in an evening. Here the checkout had to keep working throughout, the product data had to survive intact, and a mistake isn't a cosmetic bug — it's an order that didn't happen.

So the presentation layer was rebuilt around the products and the brand story while the WooCommerce flow stayed intact underneath it. The visual work happens above the commerce, not through it.

Mobile-first as well, because bakery browsing is a phone activity: people look at baked goods while sitting somewhere else, deciding whether to go. The photography and the menu had to work at that size first and scale up. Designing wide and squeezing down never survives the trip.

The through-line across all of the client work: if every routine change needs me, the site goes stale the moment the engagement ends.

Mrs. Powell's change promotions, menu items and seasonal specials without calling a developer, because a bakery's site changes constantly by nature. The airport's staff keep operational details current themselves — out-of-date information on a public-sector site is worse than a plain one, because people act on it. Madisonhealth's team keep the site current without a developer in the loop for routine changes.

A site the client can actually run is worth more to them than a prettier one they can't touch.

Kardia Marketing is a healthcare marketing agency. They came to me for their own site — which is a specific kind of brief, because their website isn't just a shopfront, it's the primary evidence that they know how to build one.

Their audience compounds it. Medical practices are cautious, compliance-minded buyers who are pitched constantly, so credibility had to be established quickly without the hype that would immediately cost it. For that audience the design earns the inquiry by looking like the work of people who know what they're doing, which for a marketing agency is the entire argument.

Worth stating plainly, because it's the strongest signal in this portfolio: a marketing agency chose an outside developer for the one website they're judged by. People who assess this work professionally assessed mine, and hired me.