Good Websites Are More Than Just Pretty Graphics
Here at Halifax Design Lab, we strive to create unique, engaging, creative, and effective websites. With our twelve-person team of coding and application experts, we are able to build award-winning custom websites on customer-friendly CMS (Content Management System) website platforms like WordPress. We take pride in developing one-of-a-kind, hand-coded WordPress themes, ensuring a slick, professional, stable, and secure final product. We want you to succeed, and a big part of that success is learning who your audience is, and giving them the best website experience we can deliver. Take a look at some of the diverse examples below.
Read our blog:
Why You Might Need A New Website
Here Are Just A Few Examples Of Our Work
Here at Logo Monster we always strive to create the best work we can, no matter what. We want to help your business, or your brand grow. Whether you’re a musician trying to get your music out there, or if you are a well-established company looking to keep up in an ever-changing digital world, we can help you put your best foot forward and make new contacts with confidence.
eCommerce Website Design & Build for Canadian Bookstore
The Back Alley Book Nook is a small independent bookstore in Athabasca, Alberta. In order to thrive in this modern world, small businesses like this, need a strong online presence, with an effective way to actually sell products online. For this project to work and be valuable to the client, it was very important that they are able to add new products and maintain the site themselves. We were able to create an easy-to-use site with a full shopping system and interface that is a breeze to maintain. In fact, adding each new product takes an average of just 20 seconds!
You can see the full site here: BackAlleyBookNook.com
Website Rebuild into an E-Commerce Site
Maritime Luthier and Guitar Builder Zane O’Brien has spent many many years perfecting his craft, building absolutely world-class guitars and bass guitars for the general public and some notable celebrities. He had a website that was pretty nice but was part of a hosting contract that was coming to an end. The site was also just a regular site with product galleries and contact info for purchases. It needed to be made into a one-click e-commerce website but still be designed and built in a way that Zane could add new products himself. And that’s exactly what we gave him, a fully functioning and fully scalable online store using WordPress and WooCommerce and PayPal. Now he can make new guitars and also sell vintage guitars in the same easy-to-use webstore.
You can see the full site here: LegendGuitars.com
Website Design & Build for Canadian NFT Gaming Site
This was a full website design and build using screen captures and actual assets from the mobile game. It was designed completely in mock-up and then coded in WordPress using CSS and those same graphics. The volcano animation had to be created from scratch. A super fun company that is definitely going places.
You can see the site here: IdlePetParadise.com
Website & Logo for Free Image Resource Site
This is a website we developed to help artists (tattoo artists in particular), by giving them an accurate representation of a human skull at all practical angles. The photos were developed and then processed allowing artists to trace them on their tablets or screens, or for them to print them out at any size to trace and work from manually.
You can see the site here: SkullPix.net
Logo and eCommerce Website for High-End Hand-Made Knives
It’s vitally important to know that most websites require input and effort from the client, especially in the case of an eCommerce website. When requesting a website, you’ll have to provide the written content. If your site is an eCommerce site, you’ll need to post your products to the site yourself. This means when you post new products to your new site, you’ll have to have the product description and the product images along with a price and product dimensions (for shipping calculations) ready beforehand. In this instance, the client had hoped to simply feed the products from another eCommerce site into this site. This is not possible without major security coding from the other site, and so, this project was abandoned even though it is a fully functioning eCommerce site. It could be a fantastic site if the owner was willing to put in the effort to post his products on this site.
Some of the key features of this site are the product and content “tags” and “categories” that are scripted into it. When you add a product, you can add keywords to it that are then picked up by the individual shop pages on the site. For example, “Sheepsfoot” is a tag picked up by the Sheepsfoot Shaped Blade page, thus only showing products with that particular tag. A product can have as many tags as you like, allowing it to be picked up by any number of filters and pages within the eCommerce shop system and site.
On this site, we created Knifemaker Bios, where that artist’s bio page will pull in any products with that artist’s name tag. It’s a completely filterable product display. Only knives made by that artist will show up on their individual bio page.
Check out our exclusive How To Add Products To WooCommerce, showing step-by-step just how easy it is to add products to your own WooCommerce eCommerce website.
On a high note, the client loved the logo so much that he got it tattooed on his forearm.
Logo and Website for Leather Artist Ryan McEwen, Langley, BC, Canada
The McEwen Handcraft site is everything a small independent artist’s website should be. Ryan has decided to share his passion for leatherwork with the world and start a YouTube channel that connects to an Etsy page where he can sell both physical products and templates that other leatherworkers can print out and trace onto pieces of leather. They can watch his tutorials on YouTube and work directly with the ultra-precise PDF vector templates that we develop using Adobe Illustrator. From these simple downloads, Ryan can enjoy some passive income. Once the PDFs have been uploaded, there is no more work required. He simply just keeps creating new designs that we trace and turn into finished digital products for download. Voila! Such a great revenue model.
We started by working directly with Ryan to develop his logo and brand identity. Once that was established, we mapped out his site to include all the relevant social media content that helps him stay connected to his audience. His site includes live feeds of Instagram and YouTube, as well as a direct link to his Facebook page where people can message him easily and securely. Most importantly we included an Etsy feed that feeds all the content from his shop directly into his website. One mouse-click on any product takes you to that product in his secure online Etsy store.
Website Design for ZZ Top Cover Band Cheap SunglasseZZ, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Introducing Vancouver’s premier ZZ Top cover band. This site was specifically designed to give the band all the features they’d need to show the public their media through clever content feeds that channel their Instagram and YouTube pages right into their site. We also included a special gig calendar system that allows the band, themselves, to add venues, dates, maps and all the pertinent info that the public will need to keep track of their favourite ZZ Top cover band.
Not just that, but we also designed custom section dividers that look like ripped paper instead of the normal horizontal straight-line section dividers, and the entire site is designed (like all the sites we build) to adapt to mobile devices and tablets, etc. When you view the site on smaller devices, custom photos, that are designed specifically for these smaller devices, automatically replace the larger images you see on a computer monitor. This is the power of CSS.
Then to top it all off, special animated transitions were added to the floating text, and the larger movie-poster-style text was designed with special overlaps and drop shadows to give it even more style and interest.
Note: Due to the pandemic, the band has no new videos to upload to their YouTube feed, and no new photos to upload to their Instagram feed, and no gigs to add to their Upcoming Shows, but that will change soon.
Website Overhaul for Crystalworks Gallery, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Crystalworks is a well-established business with a long history and an enthusiastic international clientele. We completely revamped their existing website, making it slick, professional, and classy, but approachable, engaging, and keeping with their reputation as a family company. The site needed to incorporate a secure CMS-based shopping cart with a shipping calculator and inventory tracking system.
Website Creation for Halifax Musician Geoff Kennedy
This site is designed to be easy for the client to maintain and update, with a gig calendar and automatic feeds for his YouTube account and his Instagram account. He can also easily input client testimonials with a slick testimonial system that has preexisting fields for maps and logos etc. It really is a simple site to maintain and even includes an auto-backup system to make the site is always secure.
Custom Hand-Coded Site for Vancouver Councillor
For this job, the client wanted a fully responsive website but had absolutely no plans to update it regularly, and therefore did not want or require a WordPress site. So we hand-coded a custom site using HTML, PHP and CSS. The objective was to keep it clean and simple.
Website Design for British Heavy Metal Legends Witchfinder General
It’s important to know your audience and to communicate to them in a visual language they expect and appreciate. This reinforces the brand while attracting new buyers. Witchfinder General already has a well-established place as pioneers in the “Doom” music genre. The site needed to communicate that aesthetic right away, so that fans of this music not only recognize it right away but feel compelled to dive right in.
