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.