Jenn Mears Web Design

New Site Launched: PatsyAnn.net

PatsyAnn.net: Welcome Page

Jenn Mears Web Design has just launched a site for Patsy Ann doll enthusiasts that was designed for Marblehead resident, Debbie Essig. After collecting Patsy Ann dolls, furniture and ephemera for many years, Debbie decided to combine her love of this unique doll of the Depression Era with her gift for creating vintage design doll clothing into a site that would showcase her extensive knowledge of Patsy Ann as well as providing a way to sell her unique hand-made outfits online.

PatsyAnn.net's navigation bar

Debbie wanted to emulate the style of Effanbee’s 1930s advertising flyers, so I needed to incorporate vintage Depression Era graphic elements into the overall design. I found the Fairfax Station font to be a good choice for the main header as well as the side navigation and the page headers.

Patsy Ann with vintage clothing and accessories

I built the page template based on the Silver Dreams theme (available at Wordpress.org), and it was a highly adaptable, lightweight theme that provided a solid foundation to bring Debbie’s vision online.

New Site Launched: Todotadone.com

Mona Hersey, the proprietor of To Do! Ta Done√, a personal assistant/home organizing business, hired me to do an overhaul of a site that had started out as a hosting company generated template. 
Since Mona’s business is all about helping people to clear the clutter and confusion out of their lives, it made sense to use a cleanly organized theme such as Corporate Globe by Rankerz SEO Services. I was able to develop a new template via CSS that used the To Do! Ta Done√ colors of light green and violet and also incorporated hints of orange from the original theme. The end result is a site that is organized, colorful, easy to use and that showcases a great local business!

New Site Launched: EOyourlife.com

Last year Carrie Stack of the Say Yes Institute and a certified Life Coach, asked me about helping her to launch a s site for her new project entitled EO.  EO stands for Emotional Orgasm which is a term she and her business partner Michele Lazcano came up with to describe a moment when you connect with another person and the both of you realize that the connection has moved both of you forward to living your life fully.

I have to say I had a few EO’s of my own with this project.  In collaborating with Katharine Navins of Tallow Studio for the visual aspects of the site, I came to realize that the “splash page”, long considered a no-no among designers, can actually be a very effective tool in focusing the user’s attention on the site’s various sections before they dive right into the content.  Katharine’s use of the gentle blue and white gradient tile in the background and the clean look of the EO logo makes for a very soothing inital impression and prepares the viewer for a relaxing enjoyable time spent reading about Carrie and Michele’s vision of how we can all connect with each other and live our lives more fully.

One thing that was a fun challenge in developing the site was finding a way to display the beautiful navigational buttons Katharine designed without having to resort to javascript or tables.  I found that giving the unordered list that contained the navigation its own id and then using relative positioning to place it on the page, then allowed me to style all of the links with some universal styles, such as visibility, borders, margins, padding and line-height (to fool IE into expanding the clickable area to cover the entire button).  Then, giving each list item its own id gave me precise control over where the link was displayed via absolute positioning and also allowed me to display a different background (the various buttons) for each link.

Social networking, by its very nature, is also a big part of EOyourlife’s focus.  In addition to the text links to Twitter and Facebook at the bottom of each page, I also installed the Add-to-Any plugin so users can easily share the site with friends.  Also in use are the plugins; MailChimp/Analytics 360 to help maintain the newsletter email list and monitor site traffic, Cforms, for the site’s contact forms and All-in-One SEO pack to enhance the use of page titles and optimize the site’s content.

Check out EOyourlife.com and share the good vibes!

New Site(s) Launch: Lovejoy Designs.net

When Katharine Navins, Tallow Studio’s owner needed a Wordpress developer to bring her site design for Lovejoy Designs to fruition, she came to Jenn Mears Web Design with the page concepts and site architecture wonderfully laid out with a great eye towards color and balance. Utilizing a theme called Silver Dreams, I was able to re-create Tallow’s design and developed some page templates to match the various looks through-out the site. The biggest challenge came with the desire to present the Portfolio and Featured Products sections with an interactive gallery that allowed the user to click on thumbnails to view a full-size image on the same page. I decided to use Alex Rabe’s NextGen Gallery plugin with some extensive modifications developed by Arafatbd.net and several other members of the Wordpress community. After a few late nights and some wp forum stalking, the site finally came together. Love Joy Designs is a Boston-based interior design firm owned by Phoebe Lovejoy Russell, a designer with a great flair for color, form and function. Her throw pillow designs were especially fun ( a great bonus when you are tweaking a gallery of them at 1am!) and her blog, Design Lab, is sure to inspire readers everywhere.