A few of the projects.

The deputy registrar office (Deputy Registrar 025) for International Falls, where the area handles vehicle tabs, titles, driver's licenses, REAL ID, and DNR registrations. A site for an office nearly everyone in the county already knows by name.

The brief: a public-services office fields the same handful of questions all day. What do I need to bring, are you open, how long is the wait? The site answers those before anyone has to pick up the phone.

One nice touch: an "office traffic" guide that lays out the best and busiest times to visit alongside the day's hours, so people can plan around the line instead of guessing.

Built in Next.js: service guides (Motor Vehicle, Driver's License, DNR), downloadable forms, a "How do I" section, and one-tap access to the most common tasks. Mobile-first, fast, and plain-spoken. A government-services site that does not feel like one.

Live in 2026 at fallsdmv.org. Footer credit: "Designed and built by Northwinds."

Leatherette patch hats out of International Falls, handmade within ten miles of Rainy Lake. LiDMasters sells two ways at once: direct retail to anyone who wants a hat, and wholesale to shops that want to stock the line at bulk pricing.

The brief was a real store, not a brochure with a contact form. A customer needs to land on a product, add it to a cart, pay, and get a confirmation. The shop owner needs to see that order, rate and print a shipping label, and get it out the door, without any of it held together by hand.

Built end to end: storefront and product pages, cart and checkout, payment processing, and Shippo wired in for live shipping rates and printed labels. Behind the counter is a custom admin dashboard to run orders and a transactional email layer that sends the confirmations on its own. What a visitor sees is the smallest part of what is actually running.

Every hat carries a lifetime patch warranty, so the store had to make that promise plainly and carry it through to the order record. Retail and wholesale run on the same system underneath, priced and presented for each audience.

Live at lidmasters.com. The full retail stack, cart through fulfillment, built by Northwinds.

Tour boat, water taxi, fishing, and guide services on Kabetogama, Namakan, and Rainy Lake, the heart of Voyageurs National Park. Run by Russ Thorpe out of Kabetogama, MN.

The brief: a site that does two things at once. Convince a first-time visitor that the captain is qualified (100 Ton Inland Masters License, NPS Commercial Use Permit, displayed up front), and give somebody who already knows they need a ride the fastest possible path to making contact.

Built end-to-end: home, services, gallery, about, contact. Three direct CTAs on every page (call, text, or message), because seasonal bookings come in over whatever channel the visitor reaches for first. Season May through October, groups up to six, single-operator booking flow.

Stack: Next.js, Tailwind, a small content layer for the gallery and services. Hosted clean, mobile-first, sub-second loads on a phone signal in the park. Footer credit: "Website by Northwinds."

Live since 2026. Gallery photos and an expanded "About Russ" page still arriving from the client as the season ramps up.