Deena Aranoff, Educator and Author

The Client:

Deena Aranoff is a multi-faceted educator, author, and wellness advocate. Finding a style and design that showcased her varied activities and balanced her modern and traditional sensibilities was challenging. 

Theme:  

We used the JupiterX Multifunction theme without the Woocommerce integration (not needed)

Main Plugins:

The Event Calendar

Formidable Forms

Newsletter

Note: We are planning a change to Eventin in order to accommodate the site owners online events seamlessly. 

 

 

Kaye Royer, Clarinetist

Kaye’s site began as a couple of pages on her husband Ron’s extensive site but with one navigation bar, it was confusing as to whose site you were really navigating.  We solved this problem with very little additional expense by purchasing a domain for  Kaye and installing a separate iteration of WordPress on a subdomain of the parent site and redirecting the new domain to the sub-domain.  The result is the look of a separate site but on one hosting account.

Scarborough Philharmonic Orchestra Website

The Scarborough Philharmonic Orchestra is an amazing 40 year old community orchestra in Scarborough, Ontario. Once an independent city, Scarborough was annexed to Toronto by provincial decree in the 1990’s, but maintains an independent identity.  Developing a new website for the orchestra was a considerable challenge due to some years of neglect of their prior site.  The site was built on a child them of a deprecated them and much of it’s architecture was dependent on premium plugins with expired licenses. No wonder the staff of the orchestra was reporting that the site was balky and the simplist posts would encounter difficuties.

Unravelling the problems, it came to light that the site had been developed by a small local communications business that had, for the most part given up on web design.  Once again, no one in the organization had really noticed but simply carried on.  I was reminded of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance again.  In the book the character talks about how neglecting a dripping tap erodes your quality of life over time.   Like a dripping tap, the problems with the website were affected every level and aspect of the organizations work

 

Organizing the orcestra’s many videos was one of the challenges with this build.  Originally I built video portfolios as pictured here, but, given some recent changes in Google Search Console, I am transitioning the sit over to a video custom post type to have only one video on a post. Using a custom taxonomy, the videos are aggregated on archive pages.

Another challenge was setting up a self-hosted ticketing system.  In this case we used The Event Calendar and Event Ticets from Modern Tribe.  

Larry Carbone, Veterinarian and Animal Rights Activist

The Project

Starting with content on a WordPress.com blog, create a multi-faceted site for an individual with streams of activity including consulting, activism, nature photography and crafting.

The Look

I drew on colours from the site owners photography and pottery.

Logo

The site logo was taken from art on the site owner’s pottery.

Ron Royer, Composer and Conductor

This project presented several challenges.  The client had been left with an unworkable site by a web developer that used multiple subscription plugins to create content.  A year later with all the subscriptions lapsed, content became increasingly broken and restoring the site would mean a ridiculous investment in monthly or annual fees.  The job then was to retrieve the data and reconstruct the site on a non-subscription basis while maintaining much of the same look and feel.

Theresa Shea, Author-Edmonton, AL

The Edmonton author came to us with a hand-coded site built in 2012 that she was unable to update by herself.

The site had been launched to coincide with the publication of her first book and she was about to launch a second novel in October 2021.

Content included: Readers comments, reviews, links to booksellers, and a calendar for book signings and readings.

Jordan de Souza, Conductor-Berlin/Toronto

Having a static site just didn’t fit the rocketing career of trend-setting conductor, Jordan de Souza. Having previously worked with Jordan on some small communications projects, we took on website design and management from 2017 to 2025 (when he migrated to a German-based design company.) 

One of the features Jordan most needed was an events calendar to keep his fans informed on where to catch one of his conducting engagements.  We opted for a simple version of The Event Calendar with some CSS customizations to fit the style of the site.

Dr. Madeline Goodman, Psychiatrist, Portland ME

Dr. Madeline Goodman, Psychiatry and Psychotherapy 2020

This US based mental health professional wanted a site that spoke to her love of nature.  ArtsCubed worked with her to develop a logo (a two sided fern frond) and her tag line “Walking Out of the Woods Together”. We used original photographs for the nature-themed backgrounds and decorative panels.

Visit site:  https://drmadelinegoodman.com

MEDIA SKINNING

We created media loops as textures to give the feeling of being in nature to the site visitor. Still photos are substituted for mobile visitors.

Puppetmongers Theatre, Toronto

Puppetmongers Website Project 2017-2020

The challenge for this veteran puppetry theatre company was quickly conveying the range of activities that involved works for audiences of all ages.  We wanted to avoid a “just for children” look.  The solution was found in a sophisticated but colourful palette and a media skinned hero slider that included a video montage from varied activities.

Arts Cubed has not been managing this site since 2021 and as of April 2025 if appears to be offline. 

Video skinning effect