Recreate Fitness brings a whole new approach to fitness, based on the novel idea that working out should be fun. You can see it in the faces of members as they workout (actual smiles can be seen). And you can hear it in the way that owner Tina Jeffers talks about the community that has developed among members. Not only does Recreate Fitness offer one on one instruction (and the most hands on group training classes in Portland), but they also foster a thriving community where personal development, friendship, and fun are key. 

The folks at Recreate were seeking a website that would act as a living extension of their philosophy. Thus, we had a twofold mission with this site - bringing to visual life the philosphy of the gym and making communication.

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A quick hello and thanks to everyone who wrote us over the past month with kind thoughts about Zoë! We’re back in the studio now and eager to share our newest projects, a handful of which are launching in the next month or so.

Needmore is out on maternity/paternity leave for the month of April welcoming Portland’s newest little designer to the world - Zoë Rae Brigleb (born April 9). While we are away, we’ll be updating our blog and Twitter page. Happy Spring!

We’ve just released a website for one of North Portland’s newest watering holes, Saraveza. They say you can never go home, but if you happen to be a Wisconsin native – you most certainly can! With a frequently updated draft list, commitment to delicious pasties made from local ingredients, award-winning salads, and a love of all things Packers – Saraveza is set to become an instant local favorite.

Saraveza has a lot going on – and they make it easy as pie to keep up to date on what is happening with a smorgasbord of choices; follow them on Twitter, sign up for their mailing list, or read their Tavern Talk blog.

Keeping up a website for your own business requires constant care and feeding or, you might say, kaizen. In the interest of having the best website possible without having all the time in the world to spend on it, we sometimes pick a chunk or two of the website to improve upon. Today I was installing a feature that will let us twitter without leaving our blog posting screen. Since I was already working on the website, I decided to try some small improvements to the Getting Started text at the bottom left of our website.

This text appears on every page in our site. The hope is that someone will be browsing around and suddenly decide they want to hire us. It can happen. We want to make that seem just as simple and easy as possible!

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We’ve spoken many times of our love of the Heceta Head Lighthouse, a retreat that beckons to us as often as we are able to answer. Now, with the upcoming release of their Lighthouse Breakfast Cookbook, we’ll have a little piece of the coast in our home. Not that this will keep us from venturing over. Congratulations, friends!

When we launched Saint Cupcake’s website back in September of last year, there was one project left on the drawing board: Cupcake Kits. The idea was to build a really simple way for people to “assemble” a kit of three cupcakes, three frostings, three toppings, and get it in the mail. You can then put them together however you want.

This created an interesting dilemma. There is no existing system for doing this sort of thing, and so we spent a lot of time thinking about how best to build this interface. We decided that it had to be something really visual. We wanted the user to get lots of feedback. We wanted to make sure they had picked exactly the right amount of each ingredient, before allowing them to check out. And we wanted to somehow get all this information into one product in PayPal, keeping the whole thing as simple as possible. Oh, and don’t forget, we’re using the ExpressionEngine content management system, so we have to make sure that our client can easily change the available items around at any time.

This fun project has flown right off the shelf and into reality. Take a peek at Saint Cupcake Takes Flight. We wrote custom jQuery code to allow visitors to drag-and-drop their selections into a set of nine different boxes, three for each type of item. Rolling over the different items gives you a description of each. Once you’ve selected nine appropriate items, the checkout button appears, ensuring that your order is correct. And once you check out, all your information is encoded into a single item in your PayPal shopping cart!

Try it. It’s fun!

We’re ardent users of Campaign Monitor’s newsletter system (our own newsletter as well as many of our clients’ newsletters go out on this system) and have been since the company’s early days. We’ve been interested to see them grow and change over time - and with such transparency. Thus, it is with much interest that I read their post about their latest website redesign and relished the opportunity to sift through the many iterations of their home page redesign. The final design is clean, clear and informational.

Although there is something about these couple early iterations that sets our hearts aflutter.

Although we won’t be making it to the home page of their site, we still enjoyed revisiting our interview with them back in 2007, way before we were both Briglebs.

We recently switched to a different office in our building, and neglected to check one small thing beforehand: cell phone reception. While we got a terrific signal on the 2nd floor, it’s strikingly bad on the first floor! Generally, if we get a call and we want to actually have a conversation, we have to stand in the corner of the room or walk the halls. This is unfortunate, because there’s no gadget I love like my iPhone. It’s sad that it just won’t cut it down there.

So we’ve had to start looking around for another provider, which can be relied upon a bit more than the cell phone signal. We started our search with Qwest, since they supply our data connection, but their website is confusing and their support isn’t great, and while their Internet service is reliable, it’s not fast enough and they have no plans to improve their speed in our building.

We next looked at Comcast. They can offer data rates far, far higher than Qwest, and they offer much more straightforward telephone services. Unfortunately, they charge you a $250 penalty if you want to start your service with a less than three-year commitment, which we’re just not wanting to make. So for the service that we want, running about $140 a month, we’d have to cough up nearly $400 just to get set up! We’ll come back to this in a bit.

Next stop: Vonage. This is an interesting service. It connects to your Internet service, but it lets you use regular telephones and kind of pretends to be a traditional phone service. Their rates are roughly half of what Comcast and Qwest ask, and from what I hear the call quality is pretty good. The problem I have with them is a strange one, however: their stock price. While trading at about $12 years ago, they’re now at about 35 cents, and they’re apparently being threatened with delisting by the stock exchange. Not a good sign when you are looking to set up a permanent number for your business. Not very reassuring. So we keep looking.

Finally, we take a look at Skype. This is by far the most “exciting” service out there, and I’m just in love with the philosophy. I like the idea of just getting calls on your computer, and being able to place calls from your computer, since we’re planning on upgrading our Internet speed anyway. It’s such a cool idea! Why have a separate phone, why not just be able to use your computer and a wireless headset? The problem is a predictable one: call quality. It’s not good. At its best, I find it’s about par with a cell phone, but at its worst it’s unusable. I’ve placed a couple of calls and experienced all the problems I’ve heard about elsewhere - strange echo sounds, stuttering voice, gaps of silence and so on. For a service that we want to rely on as our primary business phone number, it’s not looking good.

And that’s a shame. Because setting up Skype to supply our business phone needs would only cost seven bucks a month. That means having flexible calling options, voice mail, a custom phone number, and more. If you want to just use a telephone, you can actually buy a Skype phone for $99 that uses your wireless signal. You can even put a badge on your website or in your email that indicates if your phone is taking calls.

But again, if the call quality isn’t there, none of this matters. We are forced to choose between paying maybe $7 a month for Skype, but suffering through partly-coherent conversations, or paying about $45 a month and having trouble-free service. Or more specifically: is it worth $38 a month to have coherent, productive calls with our clients?

The answer there is sure to be a yes. We’ll be paying another $400 this year, plus buying an old-fashioned telephone, to make sure this happens. Because you don’t want to replace one problem with another. You want to fix it. And that’s what we’re probably going to do.

But… Comcast! Ugh. I just got off the phone with them again, and after a half hour of back and forth, I’m starting to realize that there’s no way on Earth to strike a deal with these people. The price is just such a sticking point for me. Does anyone have suggestions or thoughts?!?

Needmore Designs is now on Facebook!