Portfolio: Blogs & Websites

Company: Springboard Press
Business Type: Book Publisher
Website: www.springboardpress.net

Springboard Press publishes nonfiction books for the Baby Boomer generation. The majority of their readers are women and they wanted a design that incorporated some lighter colors. Basically, they provided the logo and a color scheme, and I built a WordPress driven site based upon those elements. As a male designer, I tend to focus on darker, more “masculine” colors, so this was a bit of a challenge for me. In the end, working with a couple of their editors, we managed to come up with a site with which they are very happy.

Company: BSM Digest
Business Type: Online Magazine
Website: www.bsmdigest.com

BSM Digest is an online magazine that I converted to a WordPress platform for easier content management. The logo and design was already done, and all I had to do was recreate it to be used with WordPress.

Company: Victor Berggren
Business Type: Blog
Website: www.mobilemarketingwatch.com

Victor contacted me last week, and asked if I could create a new design for his WordPress blog, Mobile Marketing Watch. His new logo was done by logoworks, and all he wanted me to do was build the site around around it. The project went incredibly smoothly, and we had a nice little blog design knocked out in less than a week.

Company: Kris and David Jackson
Business Type: Parenting Blog and Vidcast
Website: www.cleverparents.tv

I redesigned Kris and David’s main site, Clever Parents, back in September. This new site is a video blog for their vidcast, Clever Parents TV. The design is nearly identical to the original site; just tweaked to make it a video blog.

Company: Christoph Schweiger
Business Type: Real Estate Agent
Website: www.christophschweiger.com

Christoph is a real estate agent working in the Phoenix metro area. He asked me to help him create a site that would set him apart from all the other fine real estate bloggers out there. We came up with a WordPress-driven site that - in my opinion - is some of my best work to date. We’re also putting the finishing touches on a real estate listings site built with WordPress MU, although it’s not quite ready for public consumption.

Solostream Web Studio did all the design and programming on this site.

Company: Boy Genius Report, Inc
Business Type: Gadget Blog
Website: www.boygeniusreport.com

The Boy Genius came to me and asked me to re-design his WordPress-driven blog, The Boy Genius Report. Although the previous design was pretty good, the header area of the blog was composed of a flash file that extended beyond the width of a 1024×768 resolution browser window, and it looked a little odd. Another request was to convert the site from a static-width site to an elastic-width site that expanded as the browser width expanded. That was a big challenge for me as I’d never done an elastic-width site. In the end, however, the site turned out very clean and much more user-friendly than the previous version.

Company: Eagle Alliance Executive Coaching
Business Type: Executive Coach
Website: www.eaglealliance.com

Bill and Kathy Murray are the faces behind Eagle Alliance Executive Coaching. Bill contacted me to re-design and convert his static, HTML-based website to a dynamic WordPress driven platform. As the outcome clearly indicates, WordPress is much more than just a “blogging” platform. Although Bill’s new site does include a blog, it looks and acts just like a traditional website, except that it also includes the powerful content management functionality provided by the WordPress platform.

Company: E-Auction Air
Business Type: E-commerce Podcast and Blog
Website: www.eauctionair.com

E-Auction Air is one of the web’s most popular podcasts related to eBay and e-commerce and more. Hosted by eBay expert Michael Donahue, E-Auction-Air originated as a weekly radio show on KJCE radio in Austin, Texas. In January 2005, the program moved to the internet to take advantage of the booming market in online radio.

Michael was previously publishing E-Auction Air on a static website, and he contacted me to help him move it over to a WordPress platform. He told me of the hours and hours he’d have to spend to create and publish his weekly show on a static website, and he was more than excited to get everything shifted over to a more user-friendly, database-driven platform like WordPress.

Michael already had a logo that he was happy with, so I merely tweaked it a bit and built a WordPress platform that would make it quicker and easier for him to publish his show. I also incorporated WordPress Widgets so he could more easily add and remove items from the site’s sidebars.

Company: Clever Parents
Business Type: Web Magazine/Blog for Parents
Website: www.cleverparents.com

Kris and David Jackson of Raleigh, NC launched Clever Parents back in April of this year. According to Kris and David:

“Clever Parents is the website for smart, successful parents. The Clever Parents site is for all parents—moms and dads—who are figuring out ways to get the most out of every day and every dollar and who do it in a way that’s healthy, fun, and… clever.”

It didn’t take long before Kris and David had attracted several other clever parents to help them generate content for the site. Within a few months the number of articles, tips and resources on the site had grown far beyond what their current web platform - an open source program called Metadot - was able to handle. Read More

Blog Name: The Leveraged Sellout
URL: www.leveragedsellout.com

The owner of The Leveraged Sellout blog contacted me a couple weeks ago to help him move his site from Blogger to a WordPress platform hosted on his own server. His biggest complaint with the Blogger layout was it wasn’t conducive to adding features, such as recent comments or a second sidebar. Read More

Company: FamousAgents.com
Business Type: Real Estate Web Design, SEO & Hosting
Website: www.famousagents.com

Although we’re still doing some buff-n-polish of the overall site, yesterday we launched FamousAgents.com. Famous Agents is a project founded by Jim and Andrea Messenger, a husband and wife real estate company in Phoenix Az. The site is one of those integrated publishing platforms I spoke about here. The site currently includes a blog and a forum, as well as a wiki currently in development. The main site is built on a WordPress platform, while the forum is driven by vBulletin.

Company: Creative Blueprints, LLC
Business Type: Professional Coach
Website: www.momorphosis.com

Background: Momorphosis is an online community to support mothers as they navigate the journey of motherhood. Cheryl Young, the founder, is a Professional Coach and a new mother herself, and it felt only natural for her to combine those two passions to help and support other mothers.

Services Provided: Because Cheryl is somewhat of a prolific writer, she wanted a site that would be easy to manage and update. So we set her site up on a WordPress platform and designed a custom template for her. The tempate includes a separate page for articles, as well as a blog. We also created all the graphics, including the logo, and did all the programming for the site.

Company: Hi-Way Campers, Inc.
Business Type: RV Dealer
Website: www.hiwaycampers.com

Background: Hi-Way Campers, a Connecticut RV dealership, needed a new website. Their previous website was created with a template-based program offered by their web host, and it gave them very little flexibility to change the rather stale design. Further, it just wasn’t suited to handle the large number of RVs constantly moving in and out of their inventory.

Services Provided: We did a complete redesign on the site, including all new graphics and a new logo. We also wrote several pages of copy for them to help position them as “New England’s Family-Focused RV Dealer.” This position seemed perfect for them as they are, themselves, a family-owned and operated business.

Additionally, we set up a content management system to make it much easier for them to update the site. And last, but not least, we set up their site to stream video walk-thru tours of their campers, which they can produce with a video camera and upload to the site if they choose.

Company: Solostream Global Media
Website: www.solostream.com

Background: This is the main site for Solostream Global Media (that’s us).

Services Provided: Of course, we did everything. Graphics, programming, the whole shootin match. It’s built on a Worpdress platform for easy content management.

Company: Health & Fitness Sleuth
Business Type: Health Research
Website: www.hfsleuth.com

Background: The Health & Fitness Sleuth is a professional researching business founded by one of my previous coaching clients, Patricia Setzer. Patricia had been studying health and fitness for several years prior and decided it was time to turn it into a business.

Services Provided: All graphic design, logo, programming and copywriting.