Site address:

CMS: WordPress

Project Goals: Project site, blog

Passage from India is a project funded by the Priority Areas Committee of the Church of Scotland. The project takes the Microcredit funding model which has proven highly successful in India and applies it to women’s groups in some of Glasgow’s poorest neighbourhoods.

The project web site includes flexible page templates, a Flash photo gallery, downloadable project resources, and a rolling news update in the form of a blog.

CMS: WordPress

Project Goals: E-commerce, SEO

Eco Energy Sense is a Glasgow business offering two unique energy saving devices aimed at the commercial refrigeration market.

I worked with Iain and Andrew to understand their goals for the product, the sectors they wished to target, and the ways they planned to use the site to complement their in-person and offline marketing initiatives. We engaged in some thorough keyword research as well as a review of their competitor sites.

From there, I built a robust e-commerce web site which showcased each individual aspect of the products as well as the business team supporting them. Each target sector was given its own tailored page. Rotating customer testimonials and flexible page layouts ensure variety for site visitors.

CMS: WordPress

Project Goals: Categories and tags, event registration, enewsletter integration

CDAS is a coalition of professionals working in the community development field. Its web site acts as an information base for news stories, publications, and consultations. The organisation also releases a monthly bulletin and stages conferences and events.

The organisation was running its web site on Dreamweaver, its events manually, and its bulletin through Outlook. The end result is that the wealth of information within the site was impossible to search through and read, and vital time was being spent on basic administration.

We put the site on WordPress and transferred all of the site’s information – over 500 posts, 215 documents, and 2400 links – into a clearer format, making full use of WP’s categories and tags functionality.

An events module now permits easy online registration for conferences.

An e-newsletter module allows bulletins to be distributed to members with one click – rather than with many, many clicks as in the old Outlook setup.

All of the site’s functions – events, newsletters, and information – rest within one login and control panel, making the Director’s job much easier than before.

Site address: http://www.ascc-learning.org.uk (opens in a new window)

CMS: Moodle

Project Goals: Online learning, ability to provide a mix of “taster”, member-only, and accredited courses

The Association of Scottish Community Councils serves over 1,200 Community Councils across Scotland. The nation’s geographical nature makes in-person training of individual groups a difficult prospect. In 2011 we set up a virtual learning environment (VLE) – an online classroom, if you will – on the Moodle platform to provide training and development online in members’ own time.

Courses include basic lessons on the nature of Community Councils which are open to everyone, further courses on specific governance issues which are open to Community Councils only, and advanced accredited courses. Free toolkits are also available to help Community Councils work through practical issues such as running meetings and publicising activities.

The ASCC recently announced that it will be shutting down in 2012. It is envisaged that this VLE can act as a permanent resource for Community Councils after the organisation’s closure.

CMS: WordPress

Project Goals: E-commerce reskin

Brandish Bute is a social enterprise selling beautiful handmade artisan crafts from the Isle of Bute. Although they have had great success using the GetShopped ecommerce plugin, they were using a boring out-of-the-box visual design that did nothing to showcase the items on offer.

I integrated a new visual skin for the shop which blended their clean, sophisticated branding with the best of what GetShopped can do. Items are now clearly grouped by brand, type, and price range. The flexible widgetised home page allows them to change showcase items and features with a few clicks without altering the functions of the site. Social media integration allows both their products and their social enterprise blog to be shared with ease.

CMS: WordPress

Project Goals: Professional web site, centralised resource

Scotland’s geographic nature means that many third sector organisations work on a mostly virtual basis.  Their work is carried out across the country with members and managers often meeting in person only a few times a year.  For these organisations, a clear, professional web presence is a matter of identity as well as practicality.

It was a pleasure, then, to work with Community Learning and Development Managers Scotland to upgrade their web presence from a homemade Dreamweaver site to a robust web-based CMS.  The site gives its members a touchpoint for accessing the latest news and document downloads, and also offers them a public platform to discuss the latest news stories related to their work.

At the same time, the site works to explain the broad work of community learning and development to the general public and the public sector.

The document downloads section has proven to be the most popular with site users.  Everything from position papers to annual conference presentations has been filed, categorised, and explained for quick reference and access.

CMS: WordPress

Project Goals: Portfolio and blog

Chris Gray is a highly sought after orchestral trainer and conductor.  Like many creatives, his work is a combination of contract and freelance, and he needed a portfolio site that would present both his music services business and his own personality.

Working with the graphic designer Sandra Neilson (who designed my own logo and brand), Chris developed a beautiful visual identity for Ictus which conveyed the gentle fluid nature of classical music.  I was delighted to integrate the brand design, colours, and graphics into an easy-to-use WordPress site.  The project features a blog, a calendar of engagements, and downloadable CVs of work.

Sometimes you and your clients just make beautiful music together.

CMS: WordPress

Project goals: Blog re-skin

Daniel Gerber is an osteopath based in High Street, Glasgow.  He treats a range of patients across a range of conditions, ages, and economic backgrounds.  While word of mouth from satisfied clients brings in lots of new business, Daniel is an excellent example of a business owner who has chosen to focus on social media as his main means of promotion.

He set up his own web site and blog on WordPress but was using a bog-standard template.  He got in touch with me – via a Twitter referral, of course – for a fresh new look.

Daniel was keen to get a design that represented his holistic view of his profession; both an art and a clinical medicine, both an accomplishment and a work in progress.  I had a “lightbulb moment” about just how to convey that idea, and he is delighted with the result.

Daniel understands that his web site is an active, living entity and updates it constantly.  The WP theme I used for the design contains the functionality he needs to showcase and rotate his new content with ease.  When we implemented the new theme I also tidied up his content and added some good SEO practice to help it work for him even harder.

CMS: WordPress

Project Goals: I had a brilliant time developing a new web site for Pulse 98.4, East Renfrewshire’s community radio station.  The magazine site lets Pulse’s able team of volunteers update information about shows, presenter, and schedules, while sharing Pulse’s latest news and information.

A “listen live” function lets visitors hear Pulse from anywhere in the world; tags let listeners find shows by interest and theme; and behind the scenes, Google Analytics provide critical visitor demographics for Pulse’s advertisers.  Direct linking to Pulse’s social media sites ensures the widest possible audience both on and offline.

Having spent lots of time in the happy and cheeky company of the Pulse team, I am safely able to say that the WordPress CMS is so easy that even Raymond can do it?  ….(runs, ducks)

CMS: WordPress

Project Goals: This highly enjoyable site revamp for Michelle and Deb Rodger of the communications consultancy Tartan Cat sought to integrate their new minimalist branding with their extensive written output, including Michelle’s blog and weekly columns in Scotland on Sunday, while also acting as their primary business information site.

This is a site which is updated several times a week, and as always, the WordPress CMS provides the perfect platform for Michelle and Deb to manage their content every day while still providing the technical infrastructure for future growth and expansion.

CMS: WordPress

Project Goals: Clearer navigation, both visually and in terms of content organisation; improved explanation of ASCC’s work for general site visitors: what is it, what does it do, what successes has it had, and why CCs matter; a more “active” visual design and appearance; and a unified back-end interface, with all administrative tasks under one login.

This was a massive revamp project undertaken with the full involvement of ASCC’s board and staff, who were keen to acquire a very robust, flexible system to accommodate the organisation’s unique needs.  Accessibility and usability were key, as was the ease of use.  Using the advanced features of WordPress to their full effect ensures that the site will meet all of the organisation’s needs during the buildup to both their annual conference and the next round of Scottish Parliament elections.

CMS: WordPress

Project Goals: Web presence, interactivity

The web site for the PowerDown project was created in June 2010, in spite of the radiant summer sunshine which subconsciously influenced the site’s design.

PowerDown is a free energy awareness and carbon reduction project working in the towns of Barrhead, Eaglesham, and Waterfoot.   The project, which aims to reduce nearly 10,000 tonnes of carbon emissions from the atmosphere, has been funded by the Climate Challenge Fund of the Scottish Government.

The web site includes a fun project blog and an interactive map which will chart the project’s progress on a street-by-street level.

CMS: WordPress

Project Goals: SEO, reskin

The crime thriller author Gordon Brown already had a WordPress blog, but it needed to do more. A simple re-skin turned his site from an everyday blog into a powerful promotional tool which matches the cover art as well as the tone of his brilliant crime thriller novel, “Falling”.

You will be hard pressed to find a trickier SEO challenge than Gordon’s name, but we did our best!

CMS: None

Project Goals: Web presence

This was a flexible yet simple microsite for a community energy conference, done with no-frills pure HTML as a challenge to myself to remember the basics.

This is an adaptation of the Motion theme by Six Shooter Media, featuring Simple Accordions.

CMS: WordPress

Project Goals: Ecommerce, SEO

Glen Campbell is a passionate photographer who leads unique guided workshops and tours across the Scottish Highlands.  Like many photographers, he was using a Clicpic site which suited him at startup, but was now more constraining than helpful.  With a new partnership with a tour company on the cards, Glen needed to get his message across better – and fast.

We rebuilt his site on a flexible WP platform which allows him complete control over his business and his e-commerce.  We tagged all of his tours by keyword phrase for all types of visitors, ranging from casual novices to seasoned experts.  His four offerings – workshops, tours, tuition, and limited edition prints – are now arranged in clear categories.  We even included a fun applet showing the sunrise and sunset time in Inverness, which somehow makes site visitors feel intrigued enough to want to see it for themselves.

Glen’s photography is so astonishing on its own that we decided to let it speak for itself, with very little visual embellishment.  The site is designed to show off what you can do under his tutelage, and I hope that the site will encourage many visitors to take up the opportunity to “stalk the light” with him this year.

CMS: WordPress

Project Goals: Brochure site creation, SEO

John Hamilton is a professional quality management consultant who has over 35 years of experience in the field, but never needed a web site until these challenging economic times.  He asked for a basic brochure site, and having used John’s other business, Cafe le Ossa, as my “meeting room” for many a year, I was only too happy to oblige.

John will be the first to tell you that a BS EN ISO 14001:2004 audit is not the most exciting subject in the world, so the challenge for me was to present his services in plain English.  I took some time to study and understand his service offerings, and turned that research into actual pages on the web site.  In turn, I edited each of those pages for full SEO, ensuring that he will rank well for basic questions such as “What is HACCP?”

Visually, there was a clear need to differentiate John’s services from the stuffy, obtuse, and 8-point-type descriptions of his work which populate the web.  I realised that the common threads linking all of his services are safety – risk – danger – prevention, so I went with a Japanese-influenced design centred on red and black, with a smoke/fire image in the background.

CMS: WordPress

Project Goals: Site creation, web 2.0

For the past two years my husband has coordinated a charity football match which brings together ex-players from the ranks of Scottish Junior Football for the benefit of good causes.  I seem to be the default web services provider!  This year, credit crunch and all, getting corporate sponsorship is harder than ever, so we made an effort to make the site as professional as possible, while still retaining the fun spirit of the day.

WordPress’s original foundations as a blogging mechanism favour this kind of site particularly well.  As a budget-less project, I adapted a free template with a football themed design and SIFR font replacement.  Categories and tags lets him manage and update the site himself with ease.  I used a Flickr plugin to let him integrate all of last year’s match photos with no work at all.

If you are interested in being a corporate sponsor for the match, with opportunities starting at just £50, just get in touch.

CMS: WordPress

Project goals: Visual revamp, SEO, RSS news feed

In June 2009 Idea15 Web Design launched a new site for Eurotactics, a business development consultancy which brokers trade development between Scotland and the EU.

I met the managing director, Ian Traill, at a networking event last autumn.  His existing site was designed for 800×600 resolution, was heavily reliant on images for information and navigation, and had no CMS.  He had no SEO or site analytics either.  A full upgrade was well due, so we set to work revamping it onto WordPress.

Ian’s use of the very bright EU colours for his corporate branding meant that the colours almost act as the site’s design on their own, so we selected a few descriptive images from iStockphoto.  We found an absolutely perfect conceptual picture of business networking across Europe, which we used on his home page, and a few similar photos to use on inner pages.  For the page where he describes the political changes that have made his business possible, Ian had me to colour-code a map of Europe divided into the original EU countries, the “new Europe”, the likely accession countries, and the potential accession countries.

To position the site as a business resource, I used Feedwordpress to add an RSS feed of the latest EU-themed business news, as well as a facility for Ian to add events such as conferences and seminars which may be of interest to his business partners.   For SEO, we ran a keyword analysis on similar businesses and government agencies, with some amusing results (amusing in the sense that it proved that SEO is not hard nor is it brain surgery; it simply has to be done correctly, and done at all, which is more than can be said for some nationwide competitors.) Last but not least, we added translations of the home page in three target market languages.

Ian is now very comfortable updating and maintaining his web site on his own, and finds his weekly Google Analytics reports fascinating.  He’s learned that having a good business web site behind you boosts your confidence as you set yourself out to potential clients and customers, which is the main goal I set for all of my web site projects.

CMS: WordPress

Project goals: Site creation, SEO

This was a clean, sharp site for a new Dubai-based business development consultancy which presented the always entertaining challenge of designing across cultures.  Mike and I met up over the holidays to discuss his vision for the company and how to capture his 35 years of unique business experience in his web site, and his clear focus and presentation made the task very easy.

To keep the site from being too bland and corporate, I used deep tones of red and green, which are favoured colours in the Middle East.

SEO was relatively easy as there are very few businesses doing what Mike does.

Mike came up with the tagline “in a changing world”, which was a copywriting dream.

I added a simple widget which shows the local time in Dubai, lest Mike receive too many calls at odd hours!

CMS: WordPress

Project goals: Site revamp, accessibility for cognitive disabilities, move to a CMS

This small but hardworking national charity had reached the end of the line with a homemade Front Page site and needed a professional upgrade.

The critical goal was to make the site accessible to service users with bipolar disorder.  In web accessibility terms, bipolar disorder falls under the category of cognitive/intellectual disabilities, one of the five needs that web accessibility aims to address.  We tend to think of web accessibility as ways to help blind or deaf users view the web, but people with cognitive disabilities can see and hear just fine.  Their issues involve memory, comprehension, attention span, and logic skills.  Creating a site for people with bipolar disorder, who may or may not be experiencing those issues on any given day, poses a particular challenge.  Fortunately I found some fantastic resources on ways to adapt web sites for cognitive disabilities, and even got some advice from a fellow web designer who has Asperger’s Syndrome.

One of the main problems with their old site was a glitchy PHPBB forum which attracted hideous spam by the thousands, which meant that staff were spending all their time purging spam and had no time to update the site as a result.  The forum was the first thing to go, and we simply added prominent links to the Fellowship’s page on Facebook to replace it.

I did the site on WordPress with a heavily modified Arthemia magazine theme and a fantastic array of plugins and tweaks. The most challenging aspect was the tight integration between WPEcommerce, Paypal, and Cforms for their complex membership application process. Other features include an automated events plugin, an Amazon affiliates banner, and Google Analytics tracking, which has provided a critical goldmine of information to help the Fellowship steer their mission.

It’s always a great feeling to help a small charity punch above their weight.  I note with pride that every time Stacey Slater has a bipolar episode on Eastenders, hits on the site go way up, proving that you never quite know when you’ll need your web site to work for you.