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 byScott Marlow

Advancing Website Accessibility, Performance, Responsiveness & Usability

screenshot of MacDonald Hoague & Bayless attorney website

WordPress Responsive Web Development: Scott Marlow

For eight years, Marketing By Marlow has provided website development for ad agencies, graphic designers, nonprofits, PR firms, and small businesses all around Seattle.
Continue reading “Advancing Website Accessibility, Performance, Responsiveness & Usability”

My First Logo

screenshot Seasonal Color Pots

A makeover for Toni Cross’ container gardening website. Toni and I worked together choosing a new, softer palette for her site – while I dug into my first logo design. Technically, it’s a font treatment for her company name, and tagline: beauty in small spaces.

I converted Toni’s nested table-based website to a hybrid CSS-table site last season. In the future, we can use CSS to implement seasonal colors for her site skin too.

Imitation – the sincerest form of flattery?

NW Trail Alliance logo

This week, PUMP (Portland United Mountain Pedalers) unveiled a new name and logo for the mountain bike advocacy organization. The new name, Northwest Trail Alliance, sounds flat and uninspiring compared to PUMP.

The new logo, however, is what’s really unoriginal. When you borrow another organization’s logo, that’s not called rebranding. Let’s call it copybranding.

Seattle’s Backcountry Bicycle Trails Club recently rebranded and chose a controversial name– Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance. Did Kris Schamp (former marketing specialist for Bike Gallery) unconsciously, or consciously, misappropriate the logo (below) that BBTC had used for over ten years?

Backcountry Bicycle Trails Club logo
The recently retired BBTC logo was created by Ross Cattelan, a long-time BBTC supporter and professional graphic designer. After I developed a concept with another designer, Ross added depth to the imagery and he created a new color palette that was used across all BBTC marketing materials (until last year when BBTC evolved to Evergreen).

Legally, Northwest Trail Alliance is not in danger of trademark violation. Its new design deviates significantly enough from the BBTC logo that it is probably not “confusingly similar.”

When determining infringement, the Court considers the following elements:

  1. Strength of the mark
  2. Proximity of the goods
  3. Similarity of the marks
  4. Evidence of actual confusion
  5. Marketing channels used
  6. Type of goods and the degree of care likely to be exercised by the purchaser
  7. Defendant’s intent in selecting the mark
  8. Likelihood of expansion of the product lines

A little market research and common courtesy can help ward off trademark suits.