You don't know Modern Magic.  I mean you might know, Jeff Mayland, the owner, personally, but how do you know we are a good company?  Why not just hire someone else?  

"Its just my menu, online", we had a potential client tell us, while sitting in her fish restaurant.  Hear that?  I said "tell us".  They told us, what a website is.  The restaurant owner told the website designer how to do their job.  We told her, "your fried catfish is just thrown in oil like a french fry"..... no we didn't, that would be rude.  We told her that her website has to be the best first impression that many new web-savvy customers will get.  It is almost as important as your storefront and interior decor.  It has to give the web user that impression of what it would be like to be sitting in this room and eating this fried catfish.  This restaurant is dark and cozy, candle lit, with antique art mixed in with used local fishing equipment.  You have guest musicians and invite only events.  You have a fusion of Asian, French, and American items on the menu.  You are in a small town with limited parking.  Your website has to reflect that.

So we put together a website with a dark style and classy graphics with a touch of fun comical icons.  It had a social community blog of the events and customer and critic's reviews.  We modified a newsletter tool to be an invitation emailer.  The site menus and text could be instantly translated to many languages.  The Contact Us, page was a virtual tour of the restaurant's interior and how to get there and where to park.  And a CMS was the way to go, not just uploading the menu onto a one page site.  We sold her an extension of her restaurant online!

This story has nothing to do with Model Labs.  I just like that story from one of our first clients.  And if you have read this far without clicking off this page to find something about Model Labs then it was either a really good story or you really want to know something about the Model Labs website.....  Well than, I fibbed a bit.  That story was a bit like Model Labs LLC.  They wanted a new website and look for their company.  However, they were, understandably, uneasy about having us completely redesign their image on the Internet.  They knew, as I said above, that the "website has to be the best first impression that [their] customers will get", period!  So as a test they hired us to design the smaller department of their business, the architecture website.   That didn't crush our ego... bruised maybe, but crushed, no!   It spurned us on, to exceed their expectations.  

We knew the website had to hit every "spec, code and detail" of an Architects desire for form and function.  The arch.modellabs.com site showcases 3d printed architectural scale models along with testimonials, large scale project quote forms, and explanations of the benefits of their service.   It sells their service as if they had spoken to the web user, face to face.  

Well the good news is that Model Labs LLC gave us a shot, after a while, at the main website www.modellabs.com.  The amount of website techniques and SEO we had learned since the architecture site would knock their socks off..... and it did.  One of the owners of modellabs no longer wears socks, just sandals.  :-)

Website Specs for arch.modellabs.com:

1. Joomla 1.5
2. Java (nearly unlimited) uploader application integration
3. Recoding plugins to do what stock Joomla plugins do today.