Projects and Clients
Layme Duck Consulting has been building personal and professional web sites since 1997. Below is a select list of some of our more recent projects.
In addition to this list, Layme Duck has also either developed or been instrumental in the creation of dozens of other sites, from customer service portals to internet startups to major companies. As with the nature of the Internet, most of these sites are no longer available online; however, if you'd like to learn more or see screen shots, feel free to contact us.
The current look of Arm's Reach. Layme Duck has overseen and developed 3 different site designs since 2000.
Arm's Reach
"The Arm's Reach Co-Sleeper® Bassinet is a unique creation that began with a mother and father's need for a safe sleeping environment for their child. They, like many parents, had rediscovered the benefits of co-sleeping with their infants — increased bonding, ease of feeding and a greater sense of closeness — yet were concerned modern beds weren't appropriate for a baby's space. They solved this problem by placing the child at the side of the bed — literally within arm's reach! Their result is a wonderful series of bassinets that keep babies close to their parents during the important early months of development."
I ran the Arm's Reach web site for over 7 years, from 2000 until the end of 2007. In that time, I oversaw multiple design changes, re-organized their content into database-driven engine, installed a shopping cart, and did the daily maintenance a site like that demands. It was a really unique experience in that I inherited a site that was practically an imagemap and guided it from static HTML through ASP and into PHP. You don't get that kind of opportunity very often, and I'm grateful for the experience.
Breker Systems
I've had a working relationship with key members of Breker Verification Systems for several years. I was contacted in 2005 to do a total package for them — logo, color scheme, business cards, and web site.
Their product Trek™ deals with functional logic verification; it figures out organization structures and hierarchies. The logo is a stylized representation of this. From the viewer's perspective it can be either a pyramid or a tree, both symbols of org charts the world over. The splash graphic of an engineer struggling to make sense of thousands of Post-Its™ was borne during a conversation of the process Trek simplifies. Without it, this is the development process.
The site has been maintained by Layme Duck since its launch.
Earth Prime
Sliders was a network television science fiction show that ran from 1995-2000. It dealt with parallel worlds and followed the adventures of a group of people who found a way to travel between them. At times excellent, at other times mind-numbing, the show attracted a cult following, myself included. Earth Prime is my site dedicated to the show.
Starting as a simple Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to the show's multiverse, the site grew by leaps and bounds, with episode guides and reviews, downloadable scripts, exclusive media and interviews joining my original fictional travelogues and storylines. It's the largest site dedicated to the show on the Internet, and aside from content juggernauts Wikipedia and iMDb, it's consistently the number 1 pick with the Google search engine. I'm immensely proud of the site and what it's accomplished, and if you're a fan of Sliders, I invite you to check it out.
LSS was originally designed to be one of a string of skin care product web sites.
Luxury Skin Shop
Luxury Skin Shop was my second project while working for Metataggers/Bonfire Marketing in 2005. Built off the skeleton of X-Cart, a commercial shopping cart software, LSS was heavily modified by myself, graphic artist Veronica Vera, and Russian programmers (the program was developed in Russia.
This site is notable for a few reasons. Most important, it exposed me to PHP; until this point I'd been programming almost exclusively in ASP (Active Server Page) technology (the pendulum has now turned in the other direction). But it also exposed me to being a project lead, both in communicating with the Russian team for custom components and effecting the design with Veronica. Until this point, I'd built sites as an independent consultant, so working with a competent team spanning half the globe was a great chance for me to develop new managerial skills.
Because of the name similarity, the title font and slogan are based on beer manufacturer Heineken's.
Matt Heinecke
Matt's a good friend of mine — he sang at my wedding and made a point of singing a few Def Leppard covers for me when he'd appear live. So I was happy to build his site for him. It's got some great photography I can't take credit for tying everything together, but the design is simple and elegant. He's moved to MySpace but his site remains a place where you can download his catalog of excellent music. If you live in Southern California, keep an eye out for when he books a show — you won't be disappointed.
The site's header graphic is based on N.C. Wyeth's “Buy War Bonds” propaganda poster from 1942.
Matt Hutaff: Live Free or Die
This website was originally called "People Stink" to go along with its original domain name, peoplestink.com. It was started in the late '90s with the intent of being another in a burgeoning market of stupid retro-fawning. The inspiration was stuff like Seanbaby or Matt from X-Entertainment. After writing a dozen or so articles with some friends, it closed shop and became a repository for whatever writing I was doing at the time — magazine pieces, op-eds, or old college articles.
As the tone of my writing became more serious and I began what would be a four-year stint at The Simon writing my acclaimed "Canon Fodder" column, I woke up to the fact that my writing was being showcased on a web site with an unimaginably stupid name. The name changed, and I set about redesigning the site to reflect the look of my book collecting my favorite pieces together.
The end result is matthutaff.com, which borrows its art elements from old propaganda posters and Ben Franklin woodcuts. It vibes with the content of my columns for The Simon, which was more or less a non-stop attack on the government and religion while being published.
Roger A. Brown & Company
A fixture in accounting in Southern California, Roger A. Brown & Company (RABco) was a long-standing client of Metataggers/Bonfire Marketing. They originally contracted to build five separate web sites, each one representing a different facet of their business. I think, in the end, only two were built (the other being RABco Payroll, which I coded but did not design).
This site was designed and built in less than two days. I was in the process of leaving Bonfire at the time, but even though the project landed in my lap with very little turnaround time, I'm still pleased with the end result. I thought the color scheme was appropriate for an accounting firm: solid, mature, and the right shade of dull.
Scripps College
"Founded by newspaper publisher and philanthropist Ellen Browning Scripps in 1926, Scripps is the women's college of The Claremont Colleges. Scripps women lay claim to the best of both worlds: a superb liberal arts education on one of America's most beautiful college campuses as well as the opportunity to take advantage of educational and co-curricular offerings at four coed colleges literally next door to one another. Scripps graduates go on to some of the most prestigious graduate schools in the nation and leadership positions in a wide range of academic fields and endeavors."
I was hired by Scripps College in 2006 to both maintain their existing web site and build a new one. The website's look hadn't changed since 2003 and used an entirely static code design. The result was 17,000 individual pages, many obsolete, broken, or inconsistent with the College's design principles.
Over the next 12 months, I worked with College officials to design a new look that incorporated graphical and stylistic elements sorely needed for a women's college website, and then built it. Fully two-thirds of the site is driven by content management systems or databases, creating a site that is both dynamic and easy to maintain.
Hundreds of nested tables and fixed table widths and heights created this.
Skullbase Institute
I wish I could take credit for SBI's amazing design — that chestnut belongs squarely with Tim Morra at Jadicom — but I am responsible for the site's architecture. The reason — Search Engine Optimization — resulted in thousands of individual static pages.
This was an immense undertaking, and the result was worthwhile for the contacts made at Jadicom. I tracked down the search engine, installed it, and tweaked it (it's the only dynamic part of the site). But if I could do it again, the content would be dynamic, because the optimization results the same but the upkeep would be a fraction of the size.
Ultima 6 Project
I formed the Ultima 6 Project in 2001 as a desire to play game developer. The goal is to build a remake of Origin's Ultima VI: The False Prophet with newer graphics and a more immersive engine. The team of world builders, artists, animators and story editors are in the process of reworking the game's core plot into something more intense and plot driven than the original. It should be a blast to play when it's done. Just make sure you have a copy of Microsoft's Dungeon Siege when it's available; it's built off that game's 3D engine.
When the project started, I managed everything, including the website. Six years later and it's all I oversee at this point. The men and women who came onboard over the years are doing a fantastic job of building a worthy heir to the Ultima series.