Full Website: Memory Mosaics
Caroline is a local artist who makes the most wonderful creations – Memory Mosaics. They are a series of small squares that are custom drawn in coloured pencil to capture the life of another person. You sit down with her – a treat in itself, she’s a warm and caring person – and share stories from your own life or that of a loved one, then Caroline turns those tales into pictures. Her art is so personal and it makes a wonderful gift for a significant birthday or anniversary.
Caroline needed a web presence as her old site was quite out of date and hard for her to update. As well, she was interested in changing her semi-annual book recommendation newsletters into a blog. We decided to combine both her business site and new blog into one website, run on WordPress.
She wanted something simple and very easy to navigate, and something that would show off her art. Also, she wanted a nice splash of colour to match her colourful artwork. I installed and set up WordPress for her, customized her theme, created a gallery of her artwork, and created custom headers for her business pages and her new blog – Tell Me A Story.
See the full site in action here. Click to enlarge the image.
Full Website: BellesPlus
BellesPlus is the brainchild and labour of love of Catherine Leteinturier Guissé. It’s a massive directory of shops around the world where you can find the most stylish and most durable plus-size clothing and supplies. She has poured hours of work into searching for stores the world over – as well as online shops – where you can find plus size merchandise of all kinds.
Her old site was built on an Access database, making it hard to maintain and impossible to promote using SEO. I ported the data into WordPress and created a new site for her using DirectoryPress, a complex theme built on top of WordPress. I customized her theme extensively, added additional functionality including an online store, set up online ads, and created a home for her blog, which previously was hosted on Blogger.
Now that everything BellesPlus is under one umbrella, it presents a common face for the directory to the world. It can be maintained from any computer and can be fully crawled by search engines. It’s so easy now to work with the data and modify it, too, that the site as a whole is healthier and happier.
See the full site in action here.
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Full Website: Lee Ann Eckhardt Smith
Lee Ann Eckhardt Smith is an Ottawa-area freelance writer. She’s spent the last two years working on a new non-fiction book, Muskoka’s Main Street, about the history of settlers and surveyors who built the Muskoka Colonization Road. With the release of the book last summer, she wanted a new website to help promote the project and her other adventures in writing.
I built Lee Ann an entire site from the ground up, on WordPress. It introduces her as an author; provides tons of information about her new book, as well as her previously published book, Strength Within; and packs in all you need to know about classes she teaches, articles she’s written, and her future authorship plans. The site also houses her blog, which follows her journey as she creates an entire book from outline through final publication. The site also includes an evolutionary map that shows the progress of the road, stepped over time, that I created.
It was a lot of information to keep organized and clean, but WordPress was up to the challenge. We were both pleased with the finished product.
See the full website in action here.
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Full Website: Edited Interiors
Heather Cameron of Edited Interiors liked her new Facebook timeline header so much, she hired me to makeover her website, too. She was already on WordPress and had lots of great content to work with. I changed her theme and made several theme customizations, reorganized and aligned her pages, sidebar, and portfolio, gave her a social media area, and made all the colours look pretty.
See the full website in action here.
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Full Website: Adorkable Undies
Nadine is a legend around Ottawa, for her hilariously entertaining blog, history as a playwright and actress, and expertise in sex education. It was time for her to move her sassy blog off of WordPress.com, to a place where she could be master of her domain.
She wanted something that was very light and bright, with pops of bright colour. Nadine uses images in every one of her posts, making an eye-catching magazine-style layout a perfect match to her content. Using an image of a pile of colourful throw pillows as inspiration, I created a site that brought to life her ideal colour scheme. I also created a custom header for the site, ported over her old WordPress.com posts, and set up the site to manage ads.
See the full site in action here.
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Logo and Layout: Roundtable
The ladies of Roundtable Mediation and Arbitration Services are WordPress-savvy and they had already gone part of the way towards setting up a site for their new business. I designed their logo and set up a colour scheme, created a custom header and background, then customized and tweaked their theme until it was looking just the way they wanted it to be.
See the full site in action here.
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Facebook Timeline Header: Edited Interiors
Facebook’s new Timeline layout for pages gives businesses a chance to impress with a fancy Timeline Header. I created a new header for Heather Cameron of Edited Interiors, a great local business that will have your house looking clean, sleek, and organized in no time.
Heather wanted something simple for the header, featuring a single striking image. I created a header using Heather’s own design wall, a new slogan, and using the colours of her logo. I also reshaped her profile picture, which is her company logo, to fit in the new profile picture box. The two work very well together.
See the Facebook page for Edited Interiors here.
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Banner and Background: Ottawa Mommy Project
Heather is the mommy behind Ottawa Mommy Project, a blog devoted to all things environmentally friendly. She’s been on a quest to find inexpensive, non-toxic, preferably homemade products for her family, and she documents her finds on her blog.
She wanted to make her WordPress-hosted blog a little more distinctive with a custom header and background. I helped her find a theme that would work with our ideas, then created a header and background that matches her style and her content.
See the blog in action here.
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Full Website: Reading and Chickens
Reading and Chickens is the personal blog of Shalini, writer, mom, and urban chicken wrangler. She’s known for her hilarious cartoons and graphs that capture all the funny bits about parenting both children and poultry.
Shalini wanted to move her blog from Blogger to its own domain, and WordPress was the best choice for the new platform. I installed WordPress and configured it for her, and made several custom changes to the design including installing a custom chicken-scratch font. Shalini made her own header in her own trademark style, and then I ported over all the old Blogger posts. Her new site was up and running in less than a week.
See the new site in action here.
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Full Website: Fit for a Kid
Fit for a Kid is the personal blog of Liisa, fitness guru, style maven, and world traveler. She’s currently on a six month adventure in Costa Rica with her husband and two boys. Her blog is a great place to tour the world vicariously, and learn about how to keep the whole family fit and fashionable.
Liisa wanted her blog moved from WordPress.com, and given a whole new look. She prefers a clean, fresh look so I made her a very simple magazine-style website. I installed and configured WordPress with some handy behind-the-scenes technology for ease of use, then ported over all her posts and comments from her old blog. I also set up a new organization structure to help group like posts and section off the home page.
See the full site in action here.
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Lynn Jatania
I'm Lynn Jatania, founder, designer, and developer at Sweet Smart Design. Here's where you can find elegant eye candy for the web.