Featured Projects

Our Empty Nest

16 Sep 2011 . . . The new-and-improved Our Empty Nest was born—a lifestyle website with less products and more emphasis on posts about ‘living simply . . . simply living well.’ —Patricia Petro

It seems to be the case in this web designer’s life that my pet projects are always the ones I put on hold. I’m much like the shoemaker whose children go without shoes. I devote so much time and energy to clients and other things, I have little time left for my own websites.

Our Empty Nest has been online for years. It started as a simple little store where I sold household stuff I no longer needed. Items were linked directly to PayPal—no shopping cart was necessary—and the site was, essentially, an online garage sale. Easy enough.

After a while, I expanded to full eCommerce, using the osCommerce shopping cart, and added distributor products to the mix. It was good experience for the designer in me, but a blog about simplifying life in an empty nest was more in tune with what I really wanted.

Thus, the new-and-improved Our Empty Nest was born—a lifestyle website with less products and more emphasis on posts about “living simply . . . simply living well.”

To create the site, I customized the framework for eStore by Elegant Themes.

Because no blog was included with the theme, I had to hack the code and insert one. It was a true challenge getting it all to integrate and function properly. The site is dynamic throughout, pulling recent posts and products onto various pages. There are also other custom features, widgets, and plugins too numerous to mention.

Our Empty Nest

Lifestyle website
WordPress theme modification
Dynamic top and secondary menus
Featured image slider
Custom image effects
Fancybox
Site search
Social media buttons
Recent post widget
Custom taxonomy
Social share buttons
Page navigation
eShop shopping cart
Secure contact form
Custom favicon

Musclebasix

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25 Mar 2011 . . . I truly can’t thank you enough for all the work you have done for me and my company. I was looking over the site last night, and I was really amazed. I am very happy with how it turned out. —Tad Teeters

Tad Teeters wanted me to redesign his existing website. His business was growing, he was launching new products, and now needed a shopping cart to handle the increased volume. Other design elements on his Wish List were a slideshow, news feed, and newsletter signup form.

For the new-and-improved Musclebasix, I used the framework for My Product by Elegant Themes and, ultimately, completely customized the entire layout by inserting a slick uBillboard slideshow and dynamic content on the HOME page pulled from the shopping cart.

Also added were new pages featuring athletes who use Musclebasix products as well as a blog for news and updates.

Musclebasix

Small business website
WordPress theme modification
Dynamic drop-down menu
uBillboard slideshow
Tabbed HOME page content
News feed
Newsletter signup
WP eCommerce shopping cart
TimThumb thumbnails
Image highlight rollovers
Fancybox
WP page navigation
Encrypted email
Secure contact form
Custom favicon

Sweet Solutions

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19 Dec 2010 . . . After all these years online, it was time to redesign Sweet Solutions and bring the site into the 21st century. —Patricia Petro

I wanted to start blogging about web design and needed a CMS like WordPress that would allow for easy updating and maintenance.

The challenge was to come up with a layout that would not only be functional and have the design elements I wanted, but would also be attractive enough to make a positive and professional first impression.

Elegant Themes was the answer. Their themes for WordPress have a solid framework with all the design elements needed for a website. It was just a matter of deciding which elements I wanted to use, moving them around to best suit my needs, and customizing the look of the layout.

For Sweet Solutions I used the ET themes, Lumin and Deep Focus, with a little help from several other ET themes, ePhoto, eStore, Minimal . . . Oh, what’s the point of listing them all? I mixed and matched where and when I wanted, and what you see here is the final result.

Sweet Solutions

Small business website
WordPress theme modification
Custom title
Dynamic top menu with rollovers
Slide-in/out search form
Image highlight rollovers
TimThumb thumbnails
Thumbnail popups
Feedburner
Tabbed blog excerpts
Portfolio gallery
WP page navigation
Fancybox
ET contact form
Custom favicon

Deb Strain

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06 Dec 2010 . . . I LOVE it! Beautiful! Thank you so much for all of the time and energy you put into my website. Everyone loves it. You are very talented . . . It has genuinely been a pleasure to work with you. —Deb Strain

When artist Deb Strain asked me to design a placeholder page for her retail business, I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

While I was working on a design for her new wholesale site, Saltbox Wholesale, Deb sent me dozens of images of her fabric patterns. The fabrics were stunning and elegant. I had used one of them, a vibrant dotted red, for the background on the wholesale site, and I knew I wanted to showcase several different fabrics (in cool blues and greens) on the placeholder page. It would give visitors a good taste of Deb’s designs and might entice them into wanting to come back for more once the actual site was launched.

With CSS and a style switcher script working their magic, visitors can simply click the thumbnail fabric swatches and, voíla . . . larger views of the my client’s beautiful fabrics appear as backgrounds on the page.

UPDATE: This layout is no longer online. In Oct 2105, five years after it was launched, Deb asked me to redesign as a landing page with links to her Etsy shop and wholesale site, Saltbox Wholesale. The style switcher was no longer needed, but you can view a demo of the original page here. On the demo page, click on the thumbnail fabric swatches to see the switcher in action.

Deb Strain

Artist placeholder page
Custom design
Style switcher script
Interchangeable backgrounds
Eight (8) background images
Eight (8) different stylesheets
Custom thumbnails
Image highlight on hover
Encrypted email
Custom favicon

Our Empty Nest

Our Empty Nest

Musclebasix

Musclebasix

Sweet Solutions

Sweet Solutions

Deb Strain

Deb Strain

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Our Empty Nest

Musclebasix

Sweet Solutions

Deb Strain

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