Cynthia Barrett Law

We’ve just launched a website redesign for Cynthia Barrett, a local Portland attorney. Cynthia works with special needs families, elders, domestic partnerships, and estate planning. One step into her office and you realize what a thoughtful, empathetic person Cynthia is. We wanted to bring this sense of experience and calm to Cynthia’s website redesign.

Original Website

Redesigned Website

We had a blast creating this website for a number of reasons:

  • We were forward thinking. It was built very much with modern standards in mind. The website should validate as HTML5 already, and uses many CSS3 enhancements. The subtle effects don’t cause problems in IE6 because they aren’t necessary for visitors, they’re just enhancements.
  • The site was built in Photoshop based on the 960.gs framework. Once the site was approved by the client, we grabbed the few necessary original graphics from PS, then quickly built the layout in HTML.
  • Because it uses a pre-built grid system, it was easy to keep the basic layout intact even in older browsers. We could relax and design as others have already done the gritty browser testing for us. Sure enough, when we ran the site through our battery of tests, there was only one single layout problem to be corrected.
  • Template files were written individually and only as necessary. We didn’t feel, for example, that an archives page was necessary. However, we did want to be sure a good ‘404’ page was there, to catch people who have a bad link. The page includes a search feature, to help guide lost visitors.
  • It was a joy to build the site in WordPress 2.9. We’ve been studying WordPress for the past few weeks, and it’s making a lot of sense. It’s quite surprising the number of different projects that can be done entirely in this system.
  • While building the site, we included the jQuery javascript library in the header, but never ended up needing it. The few effects that it does use are all from newer CSS. And there are few. This is a website for a lawyer, so we didn’t feel as though too much of that was appropriate.

We do hope you enjoy.

Kandace Brigleb

Producer, co-founder of Needmore. Currently residing on the left coast.