Renée Coppinger wanted to revamp her current site and give it a stylish look. The end result is a bold and chic site, if I do say so myself, thanks to the brilliant design work of my partner in WordPress, Sharon at Asi Asi Design.

For the Stylemakers International site, I started with the Genesis Lifestyle theme and made several customizations, one of the most noticeable being the large featured images on the home page.

I also added a top navigation bar and created left and right subsections. The left top navigation bar contains icons for RSS, Facebook, and Twitter with appropriate links to those accounts. The right area of the top navigation holds the site search. The top navigation bar was a feature of the Classic StudioPress Lifestyle theme but is not a part of the Genesis Lifestyle theme.

A small logo in the lower left footer, outside the main body of the site, completes the classy look of the site.

Project manager Amy Laff asked me if I could convert her client’s site to WordPress, and of course I said yes.

I replicated the current layout and look of the non-WordPress site and converted it to a WordPress site, which makes it much easier for the client to manage and update.

Tim and Jerry, the co-owners of TRYChips, are on a mission to get the couch potatoes of the world up and moving. They created TRYChips as a healthy alternative to the sugary “energy” snacks out there. (Let me tell you…TRYChips are delicious. Thanks Tim and Jerry for getting me addicted to those dehydrated bananas!)

Tim and Jerry had picked out the Outreach theme and were happy with the look of it, so we added his logo to it and customized a new sidebar to appear next to the homepage gallery.

After some little tweaks here and there and a bad experience with an e-commerce plugin that both Tim and I won’t soon forget, their site is a place where all their “TRYbe” can connect and find out about the latest challenging events….and get a bag of those addicting bananas.

Thanks Tim and Jerry! You’re a blast to work with.

In February 2011, the ladies at Sassy Hong Kong came to me to help them launch their new sister site, SassyMamaHK. Hester provided me with a detailed project outline and graphics. Hester is a pleasure to work with because of her attention to detail and clear information and instructions she provides me with.

Just like the SassyHongKong site, we again used the Genesis Lifestyle theme. They wanted to replicate the clean, minimalistic look of Sassy Hong Kong.

Featured Customization Since the ladies have a style all their own, they wanted something other than the typical sharing buttons for Twitter and Facebook on their site. They also wanted to include links to print the current post and to send via email to a friend. Hester provided me with the graphics they wanted to use and I custom coded a section that appears at the end of each of their posts and right above the comments section. Here’s a screen shot:

Additional coolness of this customization: the Twitter button automatically shortens the URL of the post that gets sent to Twitter.

The gals liked this custom sharing section so much that we added it to Sassy Hong Kong as well.

For this site, I teamed up once again with WorkITGibratar, Gibraltar’s social media experts, for their client Fiduciary Marine Services Limited. The clients chose the Genesis Enterprise theme for their site.

I went to work installing WordPress and the needed plugins. We put up a temporary “coming soon” page for the site so that we could work on it behind the scenes. Sharon at Asi-Asi Design completed the design, which included large graphic for the top of each page to provide a clear visual representation of the subject of the page.

The client wanted a place to make their newsletters and other documents available for download. To help manage and track the downloads of these documents, I installed the Download Manager plugin.

One special customization I provided is the News Feed Page. I custom coded this page to pull the news feeds from several different sites so that the client could provide industry-related news on their site.

It was a pleasure working with WorkITGibraltar and Asi-Asi again and I look forward to many more happy collaborations.

The ladies who run SassyHongKong.com were using Blogger for their site, which had hundreds of posts. They wanted to move to a self-hosted WordPress site and chose the StudioPress Classic Lifestyle theme.

First we imported all their content from Blogger. Then I used their existing logo and graphics and tweaked out the theme to their specifications. They knew exactly the color scheme and look they were after and it was a blast working with them. The clean, minimalistic look definitely sets their site apart from many using the Lifestyle theme.

In summer 2011, the gals at Sassy Hong Kong asked me to convert the site over to the Genesis Lifestyle theme and apply some design changes. The result is a new and improved Sassy HK.

Brenda Cuby, the Owner of The Green Familia, wanted a new vibrant look for her blog. She worked closely with Sharon at asi-asi design to get just the right look. Then it was time for me to step in and make the design a reality and start doing some tweaking for functionality and features.

I custom coded a tabbed widget area in the sidebar to highlight lots of content in a compact area. The top tabbed area pulls a teaser of the latest featured post, as well as the most recent and the most read posts. Another tabbed area allows for links to favorite resources.

One important part of this redesign was the organizing the navigation. Rearranging and recategorizing tightened up the navigation on the site and made things easier to find. Navigation is a critically important part of every site and taking time to work through the categories was time well spent.

I love the colors on this site. Brenda is a joy to work with and I’ve had the pleasure of working with her on several other sites as well.

Julia Hart is passionate about skincare and teaching people how to achieve and maintain youthful and healthy skin. After the launch of her online skincare shop last year she started to a basic blog, but it soon became apparent that she needed a better way to showcase her information and advice on skincare, plus a more effective way to drive traffic to her online shop and products. WordPress was a perfect solution, and the StudioPress Lifestyle theme was an obvious choice to showcase the large amounts of information.

Julia’s first stop was Asi Asi Design. There, Sharon created a beautiful design using the StudioPress Lifestyle theme as a basis and applying the branding from Julia’s shop (which they had designed last year) so that the new StudioPress site would blend both her ‘blog’ and ‘home page’ (the WordPress site) and her ‘online shop seamlessly and harmoniously.

After a few months, Julia realized that she needed to revamp the store and put it on a different platform. That’s when I contacted my friend Jonathan at Northbound Designs. He did a fantastic job transferring her site to Magento and applied the design updates that Sharon created. The result: The Julia Hart Skincare Shop, a more organized and visually pleasing shop that works.

Julia was such a pleasure to work with, and this was one of the first projects that Sharon and I collaborated on. We’ve found that we make a pretty smashing collaborative team.

Coming Soon: A 5-star makeover for JuliaHart.co.uk. Stay tuned!