Digital solutions, effortlessly achieved
Web and mobile apps, realized through rock-solid project management, strategic solution-ing, and smart development.
Emerging Technology - Looking for a team with experience building Augmented Reality (AR), Computer Vision, Deep Learning (AI), or Blockchain? Check out some of our latest projects using these bleeding-edge technologies.
Custom Web Applications - Need a team to build your newest web app or internal tool? We've got a decade of experience doing just that and are here to help!
Mobile Applications - Targeting a mobile audience? We specialize in native Android and iOS apps, as well as cutting-edge Progressive Web Apps for a more holistic solution.
CMS-Driven Websites - Need an informational or corporate website to support your business? We specialize in building beautiful and functional sites with content you can edit whenever you like!
Recommended Providers
Focus
Portfolio
SolarStencil, Foodalyzer, Support.com, Hirenetics, How I Met My Dog, MusicRogue, Mindjet, HostAnalytics

In-Browser Printed Media Customizer
This platform allows photographers to drop their beautiful photos into tastefully designed pamphlets, brochures, and frames. We built an interface that allows users to customize these designs by adding text, cropping photos, changing text colors, inserting graphics, and more — all within a basic web browser. When designing a site like this, one of the most pressing concerns is ensuring that the customization process is done well: easy to follow, consistent, and seamless.
Since this is an eCommerce site at its heart, we used Magento as the eCommerce core. We know it to be stable and battle-tested platform, which can handle almost any basic needs that a web-store might have. We wrote the product configuration interface from the ground up using pure unadulterated JavaScript and jQuery.
The user-facing version needed to be fun to use in addition to guiding the users through each page of the product design step-by-step. An extremely lengthy list of features needed to be available and most critically they had to look exactly like the printed version. The final result was a beautifully crafted customer-facing configuration tool that allows customers to insert images, edit text, add their own logos and more.

SolarStencil
Jacquard Products makes a high-end dye called SolarFast which is specially formulated to artists to affix custom graphics onto t-shirts and other textiles, using only sunlight. Jacquard wanted to give their customers a way to preview how it would look. Users need to be able to pick an image from their phone, and virtually stick it to the shirt or textile in augmented reality. They also needed to see it in monochrome with their chosen dye color, and tap to move/resize all in 3D and real-time–right in front of their eyes!
To provide Jacquard with the perfect solution, we chose to develop an Augmented Reality (AR) app. Through this technology, clients can hold up their phone to a shirt in real life and see how the shirt would look with their chosen design printed on it. For online customers, they can test various colors and sizes right from the comfort of their own home; brick-and-mortar customers can use their own phone with any of the in-store t-shirts to test out their designs.
The app interface gives the customers complete control over the design. They can upload various images, change colors through the various Jacquard filters, and adjust the contrast and brightness. Once the image is projected onto the shirt, the customers can use a light touch to move the image, a pinch in or out to resize it, or a two-tip touch to rotate it. All of these changes happen seamlessly in the augmented reality created by the app.

Foodalyzer
Foodalyzer is a quick and easy way to get nutritional information about your meal – just point your phone’s camera at your food and nutritional labels will appear in an augmented reality environment.
Foodalyzer was designed as a proof-of-concept that food items on store shelves could be recognized using AI and Computer Vision. The Computer Vision results needed to be cross-referenced against a database of food items to confirm that they were indeed food. After building this proof-of-concept, the product team decided that the app had real-world value of its own–or would, if we could provide nutritional information about the foods identified on-screen. We discovered that we could do this using publicly available nutritional facts and Foodalyzer was born. The larger project effort is still ongoing.
Foodalyzer is available for free in the App Store- https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/foodalyzer/id1292784140?mt=8

Squeeze Alarm
If you find yourself repeatedly hitting snooze and oversleeping, Squeeze was made with you in mind. The concept is simple: when your alarm goes off, squeeze down your iPhone’s volume button to snooze; release to un-snooze. Since the alarm will go off as soon as your hand goes limp, you won’t be able to drift back to sleep. This allows you to wake up more slowly and comfortably without risking oversleeping.
“Because springing up out of bed immediately is an unpleasant and jarring way to wake up. If you hit snooze you know you’re just going to fall back asleep, and then waking up ten minutes later you’re no more rested, but you are running ten minutes late!”

MusicRogue
A startup came to us with an idea for an app to allow users to listen to their own music when placed on hold, rather than whatever music the call center is playing.
In order to reach the broadest possible market we started with an iOS version of the app. We used a high-end audio library designed for DJs and combined it with a VOIP solution. This allowed us to build a custom music player right into the app, that can play music either from the phone itself, or stream music from providers like Spotify and Google Music.
For the calls themselves we built a scalable cloud-based VOIP service that routes calls to 800-numbers via a 3rd party telephony provider. This allowed us to have scalable, industry-leading audio quality and uptime, without having to build out the entire telephony ecosystem ourselves. We found a metered pricing plan that kept costs low, while still delivering a flawless calling experience.
You can check out the app on the iTunes store, or click here.

Spigit
For their website redesign, Spigit decided to focus on a streamlined user experience — less clicks, more comprehensive pages, and a mobile-first approach to interface design. The site had a strict hard-launch deadline, so in order to speed up the development process we maintained close daily contact with the client as we worked, continuously offering releases for content development and review. We bolstered our development efforts using the latest CSS preprocessing technologies, allowing us to rapidly deploy, iterate, and refine their intricate designs.
Months after its initial release, we’ve continued to partner with Spigit to provide weekly site updates, content changes, and support. Whether your business needs a dynamic team to crunch tasks and hit deadlines on the head, or a dependable partner in it for the long haul, Chromaplex can deliver on all fronts.
http://www.spigit.com

How I Met My Dog
A creative agency approached us with an interesting proposal for a project: How I Met My Dog, a service that partners with local animal shelters and uses canine personality testing to help match dogs with their perfect owners. Our creative partner had already built out the designs for the site; now all they needed was the business and engineering talent to get the app off the ground and oversee its development from start to finish.
How I Met My Dog is a startup with rapidly shifting requirements, so we wanted to make sure that we’d be able to build quick iterations of the app as their business needs developed. To that end, we decided to go with a tried-and-true tech stack that allowed us to iterate rapidly and efficiently while keeping overhead to a minimum. Built on a Laravel backend and a ReactJS frontend, How I Met My Dog uses phpunit for test coverage, vagrant for environment configuration, and AWS for deployment.
Thanks to everyone’s efforts, we launched How I Met My Dog in 2016 and they’ve been steadily adding regions and collecting beta feedback from their users. Perfection being a moving target, we’ve been continuing to help them iterate on the site, improving old features, adding new ones, and addressing the concerns of their users as they come up.
How I Met My Dog was featured in an Associated Press article.

Hirenetics
The client needed to create a service for pairing employers with potential candidates based on a custom matching algorithm.
We decided to build this application on the Laravel framework for its solid MVC architecture and to utilize it’s dependency management capabilities (Composer). This project was a team effort, and Composer helped maintain consistency and reliability when working with dependencies amongst multiple developers. Additionally, the use of Vagrant aided this process further and made for simple and reliable production deployment.
For payment processing, we chose to use Stripe. We needed the ability to manage multiple levels of subscription-based payments, and Stripe provided a thorough and flexible system for doing so. It also handled pro-rated subscriptions, trial periods, and one-off purchases with ease.
Due to the complex nature of the application and matching algorithms, we decided to employ thorough Unit and Integration Testing using PhpUnit.
For deployment, we chose to use Amazon EC2 because of its scalability. As this company grows, we can scale-up the server size and eventually move to an automated load-balancer to handle the kind of burst a startup may receive when they hit their “tipping point”.
http://hirenetics.com

MindManager
We rebuilt Mindjet’s corporate website to better showcase the flagship product, MindManager. To handle international support, we utilized WordPress’s multi-site features, and we hooked into Mindjet’s preexisting eCommerce platform to handle sales.
http://www.mindjet.com/mindmanager

Your Summer Skin
Your Summer Skin is a Magento based eCommerce site specializing in stylish sun protective clothing. We’ve worked with them to improve the functionality of their site, add advanced analytics, and integrate with external shopping aggregators to help drive sales.
http://yoursummerskin.com

Support.com
We rebuilt Support.com’s corporate website from scratch to match their new design. This project included a massively customizable admin panel where any content can be changed without breaking the layout. They are able to add lightboxes, slide-up forms, configure dynamic content throughout the site, and much more, just through the wordpress admin panel.
The site is also fully responsive.

Sami
Sami was built using the CodeIgniter PHP framework. For such a large-scale project, a solid MVC architecture was necessary for creating robust, organized, extensible code. Additionally, we had multiple programmers working on this application and CodeIgniter allowed for a modular approach to feature development.
The designs our partner came up with were beautiful, but also fairly complex, and we wanted to make sure we could reproduce them as closely as possible. Similarly to the modular approach we took with the core of the system, we wanted to ensure our front end styles were organized as well. As such, we decided to implement the Compass CSS framework which utilizes the SASS pre-processor. This way, we could create cleaner markup that was highly reusable, which also paved the way for us to implement a company-specific theming system down the road.
On top of the basics, Sami required some unique functionality which required us to think out of the box. The client wanted to be able to draw on Google Maps in real time: shading areas, adding pins and markers, and so forth. We were able to leverage KineticJS, a bleeding edge HTML5 Canvas framework, to implement all of the control that they needed.
We had a blast working on Sami and think that the end result is pretty slick. It’s not public facing application which makes it tough to show off, but hopefully the screenshots give you the gist!

Hands Free Carry-All
A theme-based E-Commerce site utilizing WooCommerce. Built on WordPress.
http://handsfreecarryall.com

Blood & Bolts
A custom template, E-Commerce solution utilizing WP E-Commerce. Built on WordPress.
http://blood-bolts.com

SET Media
A CMS driven site for a cutting-edge digital video ad agency. Built on WordPress using a highly customized template.
http://www.set.tv/

Laced Up Decals
Theme based Opencart eCommerce site with custom inventory import and order export functionality.
http://lacedupdecals.com/

David’s Foundation
CMS Driven WordPress site with integrated dynamic event management
faithhopelife.com//

Tahoe Unveiled
CMS Driven Business site with blog and custom promotional catalog
http://tahoeunveiled.com/

Japan Society of Northern California
CMS Driven Business Site
http://www.usajapan.org/

US-Japan Innovation Awards
CMS Driven Promotional Site with blog
http://www.usjinnovate.org/

Whole Health Consulting
CMS Driven Site using our custom Chromaplex CMS.
http://www.wholehealthconsulting.com/

Serving Up Style
For Serving Up Style, our creative partner was working with Mollysfund to develop and market a fundraising design showcase. Mollysfund is a nonprofit working to fight against lupus.
To make the event work, Mollysfund needed a custom website where local designers could submit their showcases and others could view them. They had designs ready, including separate mobile and tablet designs which we would need to recreate faithfully. The site also needed to provide a clean interface for Mollysfund to manage the showcases, approving/rejecting, editing, and organizing them.

Michael Simon DDS
CMS Driven Small Business Site
http://michaelsimondds.com/

Marina Bay Realty
CMS Driven site built on top of WordPress.
http://marinabayrealtysf.com

Costin Law Firm
CMS Driven Small Business Site
http://costinlawfirm.com

Bliss Counseling
Small Business Site with blog and event management. Custom theme built on top of WordPress.
http://www.blisscounseling.com/

West Coast Products
Online retailer.
http://www.westcoastproducts.net/

stratdev Global
Business Development in the Developing World. Custom theme built on top of our custom Chromaplex CMS. Includes localization support for several languages.
http://www.stratdevglobal.com

UCSF Brain and Spinal Injury Center
UCSF’s Brain and Spinal Injury department needed to revamp their site. They were a special case because the site not only serves as a resource to patients and their families, but also as an information repository for their laboratory scientists and providers. They needed a solution that gave them a secure and protected resource library with patient care guides for their staff to access, as well as user-facing pages which provide information to patients and their families. Most importantly, all of the content needed to be managed by Doctors, Scientists, Researchers and Assistants, so the solution had to be easy to use and intuitive to people with a scientific background.
We architected and built a custom Content Management System, based on our in-house Chromaplex Content Management System with a customized easy-to-use back-end interface designed specifically for UCSF. The interface gave their staff a centralized dashboard, allowing them to update internal resources for their care providers as well as externally facing pages for their patients and their families. We collaborated with a design agency who designed a completely new front-end look for the site’s visitors. We brought those designs to life and integrated them with the new custom back-end CMS.
http://brainandspinalinjury.org/
Reviews
the project
Blockchain Development for Internet Company
“It’s refreshing to work with a team that actively holds themselves to a high standard.”
the reviewer
the review
The client submitted this review online.
Please describe your company and your position there.
I am the co-founder and CEO of Spectrum Province. We create online monetization platforms for various kinds of content using blockchain.
For what projects/services did your company hire Chromaplex LLC?
We needed to fully build our flagship blockchain-enabled video monetization platform and prepare it for launch.
What were your goals for this project?
We wanted a partner with a strong understanding of blockchain technology and web development and integration to help us research, plan, and develop a web platform with cloud storage capabilities, blockchain elements, and the latest technology in data processing, video hosting, and streaming.
How did you select this vendor?
Chromaplex’s president personally responded to our software development request via LinkedIn. While competing responses just stated their company’s ability to handle the project, Chromaplex expressed their value-driven approach to problem solving and collaboration. We immediately decided to move forward with their team, and they have since delivered on that commitment.
Can you go into detail about the services they provided and the scope of the project?
With their guidance, we recently completed the comprehensive research and discovery phase for our blockchain-based web application. We personally met with Chromaplex to refine the scope of our project and discuss the best strategies moving forward. We are now moving into the funding phase of the process.
What was the team composition?
We work with the president, who leads a handful of expert developers. We are able to activate different team members when necessary to ensure we always have the appropriate-sized team for the task at hand. This both improves efficiency and saves money.
Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?
We are still working through the initial planning phases, but Chromaplex’s efficiency and accuracy have helped us fully understand and map out some of the most complex aspects of our product. So far, their work has been of very high quality, met all of our requirements, and surpassed our expectations. We plan to continue our partnership long after this project is completed.
How was project management arranged and how effective was it?
The president organized a scrum approach to managing the project with a focus on iterative development. We have been able to effectively prioritize our workflow for the highest return on investment possible.
What did you find most impressive about this company?
Direct access to the company president allowed for seamless collaboration and continued progress through the foundational stages of our project. All of our questions are promptly addressed and answered prior to starting each task.
Additionally, we appreciate their dedication to their company values. It’s refreshing to work with a team that actively holds themselves to a high standard.
Are there any areas where they can improve?
I see no areas to improve, they are truly an all-star team.
the project
Web Development for Agency Client
"Noah and his team at Chromaplex were a breath of fresh air. They were on time, on budget, and super communicative."
the reviewer
the review
A Clutch analyst personally interviewed this client over the phone. Below is an edited transcript.
Introduce your business and what you do there.
I'm the owner of DelMain Analytics. Our company is a full-service digital marketing agency based in Portland, Oregon.
What challenge were you trying to address with Chromaplex LLC?
Most of our clients' websites are on WordPress and, sometimes, we'll run into complex things that we can't do internally. Believe it or not, Portland is a hotbed for creative designers, and I have plenty of strategic partners in that arena. But, there are few options when it comes to doing development work, and I struggled with different partnerships.
One of our clients is a Mexico-based e-commerce company that sells silver jewelry. They had this outdated, hand-coded WordPress site that was trying to juggle 700-plus products. We needed to do a website redesign and redevelopment that was pretty complex from an e-commerce standpoint. The development was beyond our internal capability so I brought Noah [Stolmaker, president of Chromaplex LLC] and Chromaplex LLC on board.
What was the scope of their involvement?
This client is one of our largest projects with Chromaplex LLC. It was a pretty complex site because the client had more than 730 individual products with different variables like sizes and sets. Chromaplex was able to streamline their process and make future updates seamless and easy. Noah recommended the WooCommerce shopping plug-in in WordPress, and we went with that.
How did you come to work with Chromaplex LLC?
I was introduced to Noah about two years ago by a mutual friend of ours on the design side. Portland is a tight-knit creative digital town, if you will. People who do good work tend to network and find the right people. I tapped into my Rolodex of contacts and said, "I'm frustrated, you guys. I can't find developers who can work on our WordPress site."
How much have you invested with Chromaplex LLC?
So far, we have spent $10,000 to $50,000 on our engagement with Chromaplex LLC.
What is the status of this engagement?
We are still in the midst of wrapping up and launching [as of September 2016]. The project is still ongoing because the client had some minor follow-up items after we had launched the site. In December, things got rolling after the client had signed the proposal. We launched the website about a month and a half to two months ago, back in June. It was a pretty substantial project, lasting six to seven months.
Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?
It's still early because the website just launched, but I think things are going pretty well. We have around two months' worth of sales to compare against the previous year. Increasing sales isn't necessarily the objective, per se. If we're judging by the functionality of the shopping cart, the client hasn't mentioned any sort of hiccups. They also didn't have anyone calling them and saying, "I can't order through your site." If we use that as a success metric, then I'd say that things are going pretty well. We are making some final tweaks but, so far, Noah and his team totally nailed the project.
How did Chromaplex LLC perform from a project management standpoint?
One of my favorite things about Chromaplex is the fact that they are super communicative from the get-go. Communication and keeping clients updated are often lost on many other development agencies. One of the things they do is they constantly keep an updated tally of their hours with the client. Other developers usually don't do that. Clients can always see where they're at in relation to the overall estimated budget. That way, the clients know that they can't reach for items that are outside the proposal because they have to stick to the timeline and the estimate. That's a good strategy for getting things done in a timely and affordable manner.
What did you find most impressive about Chromaplex LLC?
Noah and his team at Chromaplex were a breath of fresh air. They were on time, on budget, and super communicative. They got the work done in a timely manner at a very affordable rate. One of the things I appreciated about Noah and his team is their candor. You could approach Chromaplex with a project and say, "Here are the deliverables, here's the scope, the client's trying to do this." They would completely be honest with you and say whether it was a project they could handle or not. I appreciated the fact that they tried to under-promise and over-deliver; that is something I also do in my business. It's something that Noah has done well. He's turned down projects I have sent his way because he didn't think his team was a good fit. I respect that.
Chromaplex met and surpassed all initial requirements. Their dedicated efforts helped develop a comprehensive plan for handling the most complex elements of the product. Their collaboration, communication, and emphasis on core values laid the foundation for a lasting partnership.