WebsitesClient website

Living in Western North Carolina

Website design for Living in Western North Carolina

A sunrise over the Blue Ridge will sell anyone on a visit. Whether you could actually live somewhere comes down to smaller things: the drive home, where you'd walk, what a normal week looks like. That's what this preview for Justyn Thompson tries to get at.

Above the clouds, then down to the trail

It opens above the Blue Ridge Parkway at sunrise, over a sea of clouds, with the image widening as you scroll and the type arriving in short passages. Then it becomes a field guide, with captions and small numbered entries.

One sequence follows a day outdoors through three named places: a boardwalk at Graveyard Fields for the trail, cascades and mossy boulders at Slick Rock Creek for the water, and a street musician with the evening crowd at Pack Square to bring you back into Asheville. Real place names give a newcomer something to get their bearings by.

The boardwalk at Graveyard Fields
Graveyard Fields Trail, photographed by Patrick Reynolds, September 3, 2021. Web version resized and compressed. CC BY-SA 4.0. Original photograph / CC BY-SA 4.0

The practical part

Right beside those scenes are guides for getting ready to move, a first visit and a closer look at a mountain property, plus a relocation worksheet. The regional section covers Asheville, Brevard and Pisgah, Black Mountain and Hendersonville, and asks the questions that decide a week: where you'd want to walk and how far you're willing to drive.

The home interiors are labeled as imagined rooms and kept separate from the credited regional photographs, so they don't pass for a particular house on the market.

About this preview

This is a design preview, and its inquiry form doesn't send a message. The opening has a reduced-motion version, and on a phone the photographs and words stay paired as they stack.

Cory BoehneLet's talk
Creative full-body websites portrait of Cory Boehne
04WEBSITES, DESIGNED AND BUILT

I design the site.
Then I build it.

A cookie brand that opens with a little theater. A board shop in Miami sunset colors. A cabinetmaker’s work filling the screen. I design how each site looks and moves, then build the pages, forms and tools that make it work.

Design, graphics and code since around 1999.

A different business.
A different approach.

The first few seconds matter. Here are three very different ways into a site, and the decisions behind each.

Miami Boardshop homepage with a sunset boardwalk scene and large multicolored heading.
Miami Boardshop / Homepage screenshot.
Shop website

Miami Boardshop website

Sunset color, a custom board that turns as you scroll, and direct routes to service, builds, parts and ship-in repairs.

See the Boardshop website
Website design for Utterly Good Foods
Client website

Utterly Good Foods

Ashley's cookie footage opens the page, a short signup gathers interest in drops and tastings, and a private workspace keeps track of everyone who joins.

Inside Utterly Good Foods
Website design for Wooden Beard Woodworks
Client website

Wooden Beard Woodworks

A hosted design preview for a custom woodshop, opening on reeded white oak and brass and leading into a gallery of named projects.

Tour Wooden Beard
Wooden Beard
The Green Monster entertainment center
The Green Monster entertainment center in Davie. Woodwork and photograph: Wooden Beard.
Client website

Close enough to see the grain.

I let the reeded oak, grain and brass carry the opening, then built the gallery around projects with names and places.

Tour Wooden Beard
The portraits on this site

Real photographs,
AI-generated portraits.

I made these portraits in Image Studio from several reference photographs of myself, including full-body shots. Each portrait and its surrounding objects are separate transparent images, so I can arrange them differently on each page.

Drag the divider to compare a reference photograph with a finished portrait.

AI-generated portrait of Cory for the AI perspective
Original standing photograph of Cory
Original photographAI version
  1. Farmington High

    Looking after the school's computers and network with Jacob.

  2. Cyber Port Station

    Working at an internet service provider in Farmington, New Mexico.

  3. Around 1999

    A web design firm for local restaurants, travel and hospitality businesses.

Where the web work began

It started with the school computers in Farmington.

At Farmington High, my friend Jacob and I looked after the school's computers and network for credit instead of taking a regular class. By seventeen I was working with him at Cyber Port Station, an internet service provider in Farmington, and around 1999 we started a web design firm together. I remember the name as Matrix X Solutions, which tells you roughly what year it was.

Most of our clients were local restaurants and travel and hospitality businesses. I mostly did the HTML, graphics and animation while Jacob leaned toward the backend, though we traded jobs when it made sense. There weren't many layers between an idea and the page. You made the image, wrote the markup, worked out the interaction and put it online.

I still like working that way. When I make the graphics and write the code, a visual decision and the way the page actually behaves get settled at the same time.

Continue into dealership software and Maximo

The whole
collection.

Client sites and the storefronts I keep working on come first, followed by two labeled design studies.

12 entries
Behind the design

Where some of this comes from.

The software under several of these sites, the companies behind a few of them, and the photography that trained my eye.

Your website

Tell me what
you're making.

Send what you have, whether that's photographs, a logo or just the questions customers keep asking, and tell me what visitors need to do when they arrive. I'll design how it looks, moves and reads, and build the whole thing.

Talk about your website