Some websites exist to tell a story and make it easy to act on it. Nonprofits, importers, trades, restaurants. We design and build these with the same discovery-first process we bring to everything else: listen first, then design what we find.
Twenty years of building websites
We’ve been making websites since 2004, and many of them are the kind this page is about: sites that tell a story and make it easy to act on it. Ray designs and builds. Kandace leads discovery and writes the words. With the two of us on every project, the strategy, the design, and the copy come out of the same conversations.
Santiam Heating & Sheet Metal has been heating, cooling, and fabricating in Oregon’s mid-Willamette Valley since 1994. We rebuilt the brand, wrote every page of the site, and organized the whole thing around two clear pathways: one for homeowners, one for commercial contractors, each in its own tone from the first click.
Research-driven design
Every project starts with discovery. We talk to your team, learn who you’re trying to reach, and figure out how they look for you. That research shapes the site’s structure, not a template.
Story-first, written in-house
We design how it looks and write what it says, so the site reads as one thing. We write the copy alongside the design, page by page, in your voice.
Accessible by default
We build to WCAG 2.1 AA from the start: color contrast, keyboard navigation, alt text, focus states. It’s part of how we work, not a box we check at the end.
Sucafina is a global coffee importer with offices around the world and, when they came to us, a web presence scattered across them. We built one home that lets every office speak with one voice, and gave the origin stories room to breathe, because an importer’s site is really a collection of places and people. When the build was done, we handed the system to their internal team with documentation they could run with.
Literary Arts is a Portland nonprofit whose whole business is stories: readings, lectures, classes, the Portland Book Festival. Their site’s job is to make a full calendar feel navigable and make every program feel worth your evening. We started with research, rebuilt the architecture around how people look for events, and wrote the site to sound like an organization that loves language, because it does.
Why WordPress or Craft?
For sites that aren’t online stores, we build in WordPress or Craft CMS, and we choose based on how your team works. WordPress is familiar to almost everyone and has a tool for nearly anything. Craft is built around your content, so your editors get the fields they need and nothing they don’t. (This site runs on Craft.) Either way, the site is yours, and your team runs it.
How we work on a website
Discovery comes first, then a site map, then design, with development and content running side by side. We write as we design, so nothing gets poured into a layout at the end. At handoff your team gets training and documentation, and you publish on your own schedule. After launch, we stick around. Most projects include a few months of fine-tuning, and most clients stay on a care plan, so the site stays fast, secure, accessible, and current.
