This is the previous home page:

And here is the new design, which was based on the Mystique theme by Digital Nature. I went with their theme because it offered a good choice of options, while giving a more code-minded designer like myself “under the hood” access to the template files.

I really liked their design framework for the dropdown menu at the top. I felt that the original site’s navigation didn’t include the right architecture and the user kept having to go back to the home page for links to Financial Advice and a few other items.

The original image theme of the site was lighthouses, which tied nicely into the logo and the concept of the company being a guide to financial safety. However, the photos I had originally taken now struck me as a little cold and distant; probably because I had first created the site during the winter of ’07 and I would have needed a boat to get close enough to get bigger images. So I decided to find images that seemed warmer and more engaging. I found this picture for the Long Term Care Insurance page on iStock.

The sidebar was another area that was ripe for improvement. While the old site had pages where potential clients could request a quote for whatever insurance type the page was about, Beacon decided that it would be easier all-around if they had one standard “Request a Quote” form in the sidebar where it was easy to find no matter where you are on the site. I used the CForms II plugin by Delicious Days here.

The other feature I wanted to upgrade was the location map. It’s become one of my pet peeves when a website has a static image of a map on a page when embedding a Google map of a business’s location is so damn easy. The list under “Insurance News” is a simple list of the site’s blog categories.

By converting the old site’s newsletter-style Insurance Updates pages into blog posts it killed two birds with one stone. The new site could be launched with a full blog already built in and, any new updates that a Beacon agent wanted to write would be easy to fit into the existing set of categories.

Last but not least was one feature that I really love to use on sites: the Subscribe via Email form provided by Feedburner.

A lot of clients want to have some way to contact their client base/readers without a lot of fuss. Unless they really have the resources to manage a full html newsletter service such as Mailchimp or Constant Contact, this is really an elegant solution. While some readers might understand what the orange rss icon means, there are so many still unconverted to the wonders of feed subscription that offering them a way to sign up to receive an email whenever a blog is updated with new content can be very handy.

It’s nice to come full circle with a client and re-visit an earlier job. I needed to come up with a fresh approach and I hope the new site will work well both for Beacon and their customers!

One of the design requirements, is that there had to be an image that would change every time one went to the home page. Not a bad idea, but one of those concepts so deceptively simple that it was lost in a sea of over-elaborate plugins promising to do everything short of picking up your drycleaning.

Finally, I located the Random Image plugin, but was a little skittish about the “freshness date” on the plugin’s WordPress page. It did work with 3.0.2 though except for one small issue: the code that generated the random image only worked on the template side of things, meaning, I could insert the php into the template file that the page was set to , but not on the actual page’s editing window.

I tried putting it into the no-sidebars.php file that I was using and saving it as a different template, and the random image would display, but the sidebars would show up! What’s a girl to do?

Short Code Exec PHP to the rescue! Once installed, you can input php code into the editing window (located in Settings>Short Code Exec PHP). Just be sure to leave the initial and ending php tags out. See below:

Then, I went to the page I wanted a random image to appear on and put the short code by using the random-img short code tag I had defined in the Short Exec settings.
And, just like that, I have a random image generated every time I load the page. This is great for when a plugin creator doesn’t have short code instructions available!

At least something is going right today…

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!

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.

Jenn Mears Web Design is thrilled to announce a new site launch for C3 Salon based in Marblehead, MA. Recently voted Marblehead’s number one salon, C3′s owner, Christine Knight found that she wanted to give her web site an overhaul to match her re-vamped business. Formerly Creative Cuts and Color, the name C3 Salon was available and the new url c3salon.com was chosen.

Christine wanted to emulate the rollover navigation used on a salon’s site that she liked, and it was a fun challenge to create a similar effect using just an HTML list and some a:hover CSS trickery. The home page has four nature images which, when moused over, reveal four main areas of the site.

The site’s main navigation also made use of a drop-down menu that was also styled with CSS to match the color theme of the site.

In addition to information about the salon’s stylists and services, a new contact form was utilized to enable clients to book their appointments online. This was a great experience in working with a client who was full of constructive ideas and feedback and the resulting collaboration will hopefully be a new asset to an already very successful business!