Sort of a funny title, isn’t it?  We wanted to show you the diversity of projects we’ve been working on lately.

The Breakers hotel in Long Beach has been doing a lot of remodeling over the past several years and we were able to give them custom door plates to match their clean look.  Engraved plastic is actually pretty inexpensive, whether you need key fobs, name badges, door plates like these, or larger signs.  We can get most colors of plastic and turnaround is only about a week once you approve the art.  Stop by and browse samples!

The Breakers also ordered some custom pens recently for a special campaign.  They turned out really well, and match the specs we were given about as perfectly as one could hope.  Even better, we found a pen that met the specs at a really great price.

Don’t you just love happy endings?

This project is a great example of how quickly we can get things done when everyone does their homework promptly.  We met with Terri on a Tuesday and Blair had her site all but finished Thursday afternoon.  Terri still needed to send us some text and photos, which she did, and that same day, the site was ready to go live.

Our team has plans for improvements down the road, but the Park was able to get their online presence going before the busy summer season made it impossible for Terri to even think about planning a website.  And it was super-affordable, to boot!

Meanwhile, Keleigh re-drew the Park’s logo, as the original art had been lost and they were also in need of some business cards.  Bundling this project with the website made it easy for us to create all the logo art files at once, which made it less expensive for the Park.

Congratulations on your new site, CranberryRVPark.com!

Colleen and Maria are up to it again!  To promote the new site for Tapestry Rose Yarn Shop, Saltwater Yarns and the Full Circle Café, they had us make these wonderfully cheeky window decals:

The decals are clear, with a white imprint that reads from the outside of a window when the removable decal is placed on the inside.  Stop by the Café & Store and you might just talk them out of one.

As some of you may know, many of the websites created here at beachdog.com are built using WordPress.

WordPress is a top-notch publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.  It is used for blogs about your dog and Fortune 500 companies alike.  We like it for many of our clients because:

• It allows you to make easy updates to your site without waiting, or paying for, web developers like us
• It’s simple; if you can use Microsoft Word – you can edit your WordPress site
• Because it is Open Source, the program is free, not going anywhere, and has thousands of programmers contributing to make it better
• It makes it easy for us to make your site mobile-friendly
• It makes it easy for us (inexpensive for you) to add a variety of functions to your site

WordPress has a new version (3.0) being released near the end of June.  There are quite a few exciting features but what we’re most excited about are some of the technical improvements “under the hood”. These improvements allow us to create even more impressive and complex sites.  Previously, when the team met with a new client, they determined if WordPress was a good fit or if they needed a more custom back end solution.  Much of the time, more custom meant a lot more expensive because it required a fair amount of high-end coding time.  Now, with this latest version, we can handle much more complexity, offer lower costs and keep Wordpress’s ease of use. Thats quite the trifecta!

Already have Wordpress? If you would like to chat to someone about what Wordpress 3.0 can be used to take your site to the next level — give me a woof!  360-642-4431  or ethan@beachdog.com

We’re pleased to introduce you to Ethan Seifert, who joined our team a couple of weeks ago and has been getting oriented to his change of career, state and general culture.  A Portland native, Ethan comes to us from OHSU where he was lost in a land of cubicles for a number of years.  His expertise is in database design and development (Access, MySQL…you name it), PHP, and pretty much back-end code in general.  He also brings a strong teaching acumen to our tool box; we’re plotting and planning how to best exploit his gifts for your benefit.

Ethan’s first assignment with us was to bend the upcoming release of WordPress 3.0 into submission.  I’m delighted to report that the combination of this new release of WordPress, along with Ethan’s skill, adds quite a number of fun tools to our box.  Look for lots more information on this in the coming weeks, starting with a post from Ethan later today.

If you’ve not met Blair and her trusty sidekick, Ollie, or Ethan and his muse, Humphrey, stop in and say hello!  They’re both available to you during our normal business hours of 9-5, Monday through Thursday (before and after hours, Fridays, weekends and holidays we leash everyone to desks and feed the Web Hounds kibble for code).