The complete and dramatic overhaul of the site for BCO.ie was, more than anything, a labor of love for Katherine Nolan and me. Last year was professionally rewarding but sometimes those project with a great outcome are actually soul-crushing to complete; the client turns out to secretly be useless, or you drown in spec bloat, or you spend a week battling for things like, you know, navigation.

The site for Blackrock Castle Observatory was the antidote to all of that. Their existing website, frankly, sucked. And when I went out to visit them, I was blown out of the water by what an amazing national treasure this place is, the phenomenal exhibits and activities, and the absolute heap of incredibly cool activities and events they stage each month. It was love at first site, and the feeling was mutual.

I have spent the last three months it took to build this site telling everyone I know “Go to Blackrock Castle!” And now they have a website that I sincerely hope will make you, too want to to go to BCO. It is built entirely on WordPress (on a customised theme – suck it, haters…) and features the world’s most brilliant custom events plugin by Katherine Nolan.

This client, by the way, was a dream. They accepted the design with no iterations, put content where I told them it should go, took No for an answer without issue, bought me multiple lunches, are entirely delighted and have already paid their bill. Also, their newsletter is gorgeous – you should go sign up to get the first issue and you might win space ice cream!

I was absolutely delighted to pick up a Best Ebusiness gong at the Golden Spiders on behalf of LouderVoice for Business. This project didn’t go into my portfolio because it wasn’t really a design job; with very, very little time available, we used a commercial WordPress template, customised it where needed, and lorried the rest of the time into tackling the positioning and communication issues that needed sorting.

In an inspired moment, the site got a new strapline (“Fuel Your Sales with Trust”), followed by a clearly demarcated product line up, new copy for everything, and a widget and API sign-up process. LouderVoice was called a “a strong winner in this year’s ebusiness category” and I’m delighted for them.

I don’t do a lot of brochureware sites, and the ones I do I rarely put in my portfolio because I’m not particularly gagging to do more of them. Radisens.com, however, is going in for two reasons:

One, I like it a lot. No idea why; I just do. It might be because I did the voice-over for their video,  which was fun. I’ve never done a web one before but suddenly ever client wants voiced video, so there are more coming in future projects.

Two,  if you happen to have a spare hundred thousand or two, I am telling you right now: give it to Jerry O’Brien and you will die a billionaire. This is world-class, game-changing technology for the (highly lucrative) medical diagnostics marketplace. Jerry has his head on straight, knows where he’s going, and this Irish company is one to watch on an international level.

I actually “finished” FarmVille Village about five weeks ago, shortly after I became obsessed with the Facebook game FarmVille and my friend Brian helped me load in all the crop data. Then I got really, really busy with work and never fully launched it. But this morning I noticed that 65,000 people had visited in the last 30 days and that the site’s Facebook Fanpage has 313 fans, so I thought I should just deal with the fact its already launched itself. (Thanks, Google!)

So while there are some missing crops, no advertising model and some layout issues, if you’re one of the 17 million people who plays FarmVille, feel free to become a fan and share FarmVille Village – hopefully it will keep growing into a first-rate resource.

The Good Wine Show site went live a few weeks ago, but I didn’t have the ten minutes to tidy the tiny stuff nobody else will ever notice until last night.

When you have a budget of tuppence and literally need a site the day after tomorrow, every corner gets cut – including the whole mock-up and approval process. The first time the show organisers saw this site was when it went live the morning of the deadline. I vastly prefer to sacrifice development over design time, so this site is built on a completely customised stock template, and the order form and all calculations are driven by FormSpring.

The Show site budget was for about a day, although the site took one and a half. On the plus side, three of Cork’s finest wine merchants each owe me a bottle of their favourite white, so I can live with that :)

I love The Proofreading Girl, probably because I got to use one of my favourite fonts and a cute illustration for the header and matching business identity. I think it’s a friendly representation of a professional service that’s obviously backed by a real human, and we had a lot of fun building in content to help visitors understand the real value of outsourced proofreading. (Why Hire a Proofreader still cracks me up.)