A few weeks back, I saw a posting on the MomPack looking for a web designer who would barter design services.  It’s been so long since I’ve taken on any web design clients and even longer since I’ve donated or did design work pro-bono.  The first websites I ever designed were back in 1996 (yes that means I’m old).  lol!  My first design clients came in 2000.  And some of those I took on as pro-bono sites to help me build a portfolio.  One of those sites (which is no longer up and running) was done for an older woman who created handmade floral craft items.  I took her site on for free so I could learn more about shopping carts.  In the end, I had created a very large ordering site for her that brought her a nice chunk of regular orders and income to supplement her retirement.  It was a website that she could never have afforded.  It was a great feeling.

I’m not sure what spurred me to e-mail this particular lady back.  I have no idea how I even caught the e-mail because I haven’t been actively reading the MomPack list in a long time.  But I did.  So I checked out her current site and saw that it had enough content in place that it would work as a wordpress site.  Having just redid my blog, I thought it would be nice to delve a little more into wordpress.  So I e-mailed the lady.

The non-profit is an Indiana organization run by Christine Martin.  She started it last year in hopes of helping local single parent families and families who have experienced a loss of a child.  It hit a little too close to home.  Having just helped Jeanine get through a nasty divorce and seeing firsthand the changes single parenting has brought to her life, I thought karma seemed to be staring me in the face.  I was going to help this lady if she’d let me.

So after a few e-mails back and forth with her, I started working on the website over the past few weekends.  Unfortunately, I did not take a before shot of her old website. I usually do when I work a redesign but I completely forgot and the DNS switched.  Bravenet – her old hosting – does not allow website viewing of accounts that aren’t pointing to them so there was no way to go back and view the old site using Bravenet’s server domain.  I tried.  So, I have no before shot unfortunately.

The before site was mainly white with text.  It had a menu at the top that linked to all the individual text pages.  It was designed using Bravenet’s website creator and was very basic.

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A new blog design has been LONG overdue… This time around I decided to really “design” something instead of my usual boring basic blog design.

I spent about 2-3 weeks creating the design in Photoshop.  I worked on it here and there.  I think it came out pretty nice.  After that, I spent about a week or so coding it – on and off.  In the past, I would usually find a free word press theme that I liked and tweak the code/design of that theme.  This time, I started with a completely blank wordpress design.

I came across a post on wordpress frameworks on Smashing Magazine.  I downloaded about 7-8 of them and took a look at the code to see which was more my style.  I ended up using one of Anna Linea’s frameworks as my starting point.  Along the way I learned some new coding tricks – and some old tricks that have been around for awhile but I was ignorant of.  I find that I like “designing” as much as I like “coding”.  It’s been so long since I’ve done both and I definitely enjoyed myself.

So what you now see is my “final” product.  I didn’t bother doing any cross browser checking so I have no clue how this looks in older browsers.  Hopefully not too bad.

It must be a blog update kinda of day… spent some time fixing the feed issue on Jeanine’s blog and then upgraded word press on both mine and KV’s blog. Everything feels fresh and clean now. Until next week when the next version comes out. lolol!