Work included revising and reorganizing the copy previously posted on her former website; creating a natural structure that makes it easy to understand her process; and extensive photo processing to create clear before and after photos. Tying in the new branding, DSD designed a new business card using the same fonts and colors as the website.

I still can’t believe how easy (from my point of view) this was, Katryn you made me so happy with what you have created for ms. You have been so easy to work with, this came to completion faster than I ever imagined and I am so pleased.

Thank you for making me feel even more confident in my business by being so happy & proud to show off my website. I will enjoy these business cards as well. I hope all your clients tell you how very talented & gifted you are. — Bonnie Taylor

View the new site at: www.wachh.org

Laura plays wooden flutes, whistles, concertina, pipes, vocals; with fiddles, piano, oboe, trumpet, flugelhorn, French horn, trombone, bass trombone, percussion and bass.

Together, they offer a spirited new take on the Celtic tradition, combining tunes, songs & style (traditional & new) with dazzling modern horn lines, featuring fiddles, flutes, concertina, smallpipes, vocals, step dance,
a top-notch rhythm section and a powerful 4-piece brass section in smart, joyous arrangements. 

This year we’ve launched a new website and designed a number of collateral pieces, including postcards, postcards, and business cards. Logo Design is by Doug Bratland.

Visit www.brasslassie.com

Dakota Street Design migrated all content to a template-based site on Weebly.com. The clean, bright color scheme and larger formatted graphics offer a much needed contemporary flair to the organization.

Visit: www.minnesotabluegrass.org to tour this wonderful organization's festivals and events. And, if you're so inclined - join MBOTMA to become involved in great bluegrass & old-time music. 

Dakota Street Design provided all photography, copywriting, site architecture, and e-commerce setup for the client - plus coordinating business cards: truly a full-service project!

tiesonthelevel.com

http://oraitkin.com/music

I've been working with private clients for just about 10 years now, and that means that the sites I created 10 years ago are beginning to look a bit stale. For some, the biggest issue is that the older sites are not built on responsive design systems. Responsive has become the order of the day.

Monitors have changed too. You probably don't remember this, but once upon a time, most monitors were less than 800 px wide. It was a big deal if you built a website that was too wide, because your site visitors would have to scroll sideways to view the whole display - a terrible faux pas. 

So it is with a hint of nostalgia that I bid farewell to Bolcom and Morris and William Bolcom's old websites - sites I built for them myself. We built them in 2007. The layout was a screen-grabbing 800 pixels wide, flush left. The deck across the top was a scant 75 pixels high. Nowadays on my 27" iMac that leaves a lot of landscape to spare!

Here's a sneak peek at the new website for William Bolcom & Joan Morris. Go visit it in person at www.bolcomandmorris.com. We've also re-launched William Bolcom's composer site. It's at www.williambolcom.com. 

I was inspired by downloading a font suite from github.com -- among the fonts was an icon for a frame with crop marks. Check in the browser bar at the heading - News - Dakota Street Design. Voila! It's simple, it's sweet, and it's representative of one of my favorite types of design projects... print projects with a full "bleed" that require crop marks for the printer to trim. 

Word on the street is that the latest systems will allow for responsive design of favicons - to display differently on various monitors and browsers. We'll keep an eye out for them... and maybe someday, when the fundamental 16 px canvas is bigger, Dakota Street Design will have a bigger palette to play with.

Update: January 2019

As predicted above, favicons have gotten bigger. The recommendation is now to build them at 500px square. A typical unexpected display might be as a button on a retina-display iPhone. That calls for high resolution!

Accordingly, we’ve updated our logo and our favicon.

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Adding an RSS feed to a website with a blog is a no-brainer, but in this post I'll share some tips on how to make it work for the people who use your website.

Getting the feed delivered to your browser or reader

Depending on what browser you use (such as Firefox or Safari), if you click on the RSS feed icon below, you'll see an option to subscribe to an RSS feed in your browser.  You'll be able to place a bookmark that leads immediately to the news page.

But not all browsers work with this function; if you're using Chrome, you may get a page of meaningless code.

Besides, what if you'd rather get updates delivered to your email directly?

If you right click on the RSS feed, and select "copy link address," you can open up your email client (Outlook, Macintosh Mail or the like) and create a new RSS feed. Past the link address into the feed option, and voila! - you have a live bookmark your browser where the blog updates will appear whenever posted. Remember - you have to click on the bookmark to see the updates.

Feedburner supplies the rss code with additional options. Here's an example of the same feed supplied by Feedburner:

 Subscribe in a reader

Getting the feed delivered to your email inbox

So - what if you want the update delivered straight to your email?

When logged into feedburner, click on the publicize tab, then look for email subscriptions in the left hand column. You can access html code for a form signup (as above) or a simple link to sign up for updates.

In May we launched a new site for Bodiology Pilates, a private studio located in Minnetonka, Minnesota. Proprietor Catherine Battocletti has come up with a site that is media rich and social-media savvy. She's put in a lot of extra effort to add professionally produced client videos, an active blog (Sweaty Betti's Guide to Getting In and Getting Out of the Gym), and related social media sites on Facebook, Vimeo, Linked In, Google Plus, and Yelp. 

We wish Catherine all the best in her endeavors - she makes Pilates fun and accessible for all body types. Check it out! Maybe you'll be her next client. We could all use a little encouragement to get up and moving.

 A new Dakota Street Design website, Trio Violin Project, has just launched (www.trioviolinproject.com). Dr. Steve Sirr, M.D., is a radiologist and violinist. In 1988 he had a lull in the work day and ran his violin through a CT X-ray machine, revealing an interior view of the instrument he had never imagined. He took the scans to his friend luthier John Waddle who found them equally fascinating.

Fast forward 15 years or so and the two of them connected with luthier Steve Rossow, who designed a system for carving out violin parts that exactly replicate the scans using a CNC machine. Using scans of a 1704 Stradivarius (the "Betts," now in the collection of the Library of Congress) they have successfully re-created replicas of the instrument which are not only fine works of art, but beautiful instruments in their own right.

Read more about Dr. Sirr, his colleagues and this project at: Trio Violin Project

Emily's a very inspiring young woman who has invested a great deal of time and energy in becoming qualified as a Rolfer® (see emilysavage.com if you don't happen to know what that is). 

Her new website is especially appealing because of its simplicity, muted color choices, and exceptional photography - all original photos from Emily's own travels around the globe. The site is built on a Squarespace template and offers a large image on each page which gradually vanishes as you scroll down - a lovely effect.

Because she is fully bilingual in English and Spanish, Emily wanted her site to be equally available to users of both languages. We used a couple of simple menu choices to make her site flow smoothly between the languages. The home page offers 3 choices: home - english - espanol, with drop down menus to the navigation for each section. We added a toggle just above the footer to switch between languages, too.

One more item of note: Emily is of the generation that tends to view the web entirely from phones, in her case, an iPhone. Having a site that features responsive design is essential to her ability to communicate with her peers.  

August 1, 2013 will mark a major change of direction as I leave VocalEssence and begin a new position with Minnesota State College-Southeast Technical in Red Wing as Director of Communications.

I will continue to provide graphic design and website development services under the banner of Dakota Street Design LLC. For most of my clients — especially those who are located across the United States and Europe — this won't make much difference as we'll continue our relationships via email. However, for the most part, I won't be as available for face-to-face meetings and phone conferences during weekday business hours.

While it's bittersweet to leave my dear friends at VocalEssence, I'm excited about working closer to home in a college environment. I'm giving up a 60-mile commute for a quick 3-mile ride on my motor scooter.  And — as the creative director of Dakota Street Design, I look forward to continuing my work with you!

​I've long heard the proverb about the Shoemaker's Children — it's a syndrome that has affected my own work. In modern English, "Who is worse shod than shoemaker’s wife?" (or the shoemaker's children) refers to the concept that the shoemaker puts the needs of his customers above those of his own family. In my case, it's been more that I've put the marketing needs of my clients above my own business's needs.

When you're a free-lancer, you've got to make hay while the sun shines (sorry to be mixing proverbs here). When I've got lots to do for my clients, the last thing I want to do is take time to work on marketing my business. But I would advise any client, whether a non-profit, an artist, a musician, an educational institution or a business, that it's vital to continuously market your services. ​

That's why I'm so pleased to have at last launched a re-vamped version of dakotastreetdesign.com. It's build on a sleek platform with all the latest bells & whistles, including responsive design. The template is intrinsically beautiful with very little modification on my part, allowing me to spend more time developing content (always the most challenging part of any project). ​

Now I'm happy to say my own site is up-to-date and I'm taking my own advice.

​

Sarah's site is special because she is able to sell PDFs of her scores online. The ecommerce option automatically sends a link for downloading the PDF as soon as the site visitor has purchased the item.​

Another aspect of this site is that it features responsive design. It will re-scale itself depending on the site visitor's browser - automatically redesigning the site for optimal viewing and browsing on smart phones.​

View Site: sarahmillermusic.com​