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!

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.

Michael McCarthy Law has been in development for a while now and readers will soon find that it was worth the wait!

Meant to be much more than a simple “shingle site” for a Personal Injury and Estate Handling firm, MML is aimed at educating both current and potential clients, an approach that more and more businesses are finding to be beneficial to both parties. Creating this site was an exercise in conditional tags, one of WordPress’s most powerful site architecture tools. Certain pages were designated by the client to live in the top navigational bar, while pages dealing with the various areas of practice were to have their own listing in the left sidebar. The theme is a customized version of CognoBlue 1.0 by BlogsDNA, which was a pleasure to work with, clean, flexible and consistent across browsers. Feel free to stop by Michaelmccarthylaw.com and take the grand tour!