Custom websites and web systems — a few projects worth talking about.

Most real estate agent websites are the same website. IDX search widget that sends leads to Zillow. Generic hero photo, generic tagline about dream homes. Dylan is a Winston-Salem, NC realtor building from scratch — he needed a site that worked for him, not one that funneled his leads somewhere else. We skipped IDX entirely. Instead I built five neighborhood guide pages targeting specific Winston-Salem searches, the kind of content that ranks locally and brings in buyers who are already serious about a neighborhood. Real estate also has compliance details most developers skip right past: license disclosure language, MLS trademark rules, NAP consistency, local business schema. Get those wrong and you've got either a legal problem or an SEO one, sometimes both. The result is a site that's actually Dylan's — not a re-skin of the same template half the agents in his market are running on. I want to do more projects like this. There are a lot of agents out there who would do significantly better with something built for them instead of slotted into a platform.

The brief was essentially: make this site look as exclusive as the property itself. Most hunting ranch sites look like they were built in 2008 — generic stock photos, cluttered layouts, nothing that signals you're about to spend $10,000 or more on a hunt. O.D.'s Chula Vista Ranch is one of the premier trophy whitetail destinations in the South Texas Golden Triangle, and the site needed to reflect that. I built a full React stack with a cinematic hero, dedicated lodging and hunting package pages, a gallery, and a booking flow designed for serious hunters, not casual browsers. Every design decision was made around one question: does this look as good as the place is?

The challenge with any photography portfolio site is getting out of the work's way. Most portfolio sites are either slow because of unoptimized images, or so visually busy that the photos compete with the layout. BKB Photography needed neither. I built clean, full-bleed galleries with properly optimized image delivery — Next.js Image component with responsive sizing, lazy loading, and format selection handled automatically — so pages load fast without sacrificing quality. The booking flow is there when clients need it and invisible when they don't. The result is a site where the photography is actually the first thing you notice.

I've been working with this retailer since 2000, long enough to have watched them grow from a single-location shop to three stores and a serious e-commerce operation. Over the years that's meant building a custom toolchain piece by piece — an AI fraud detection system that learns from their own order patterns, an automated product description pipeline that has processed thousands of SKUs, a Google Shopping audit platform, custom POS extensions for multi-location inventory, a NetSuite sync, and a Klaviyo integration built to drive real revenue rather than just send emails. These aren't one-off projects. Each one connects to the others and to the way the business actually works.