SavieCard was a fun project because everything was built from scratch, and I got to name it, brand it, logo it, design the site for it, and do a silly amount of print for it, which normally I hate. I do like the fact that each person has a logo colour for their card back:

The entire site was built using WordPress. With hindsight, given how much the site grew from spec to launch, I would not make that choice for this project again, and v2 will be built on a different framework. At the moment it’s held together with gaffer tape and bailing wire, but it is holding…

Recently, I got “busted” in the comments on a blog post for using a template to create a website. The website in question is WordCamp Ireland; the template in question is the suitably named Fun Design Theme.

Except there really isn’t a question. First of all, that theme was specifically credited on the WordCamp site – a credit cleverly hidden in a page on the menu called, you know, Thanks and Credits.

Second of all, I am pretty transparent about the fact that I freaking love templates. While I bill myself as a web designer, the fact of the matter is that clients really hire me to solve a problem. Generally that problem is that they don’t have a website, but sometimes it’s that they don’t have a website and don’t have any budget either.

Solving both of those problems at the the same time is my job. While a client with unlimited imagination, a healthy budget and at least a few weeks in their schedule is the ideal, it is not always the reality for the people I prefer to work with. MarketingWriteNow had 24 hours; they got Concise. Fuchsia Cottage was done as a swap; they got EarthlyTouch. Radisens wanted something blue and efficient; they got BlueLight.

While it is theoretically possible I am the slowest web designer in the universe, I don’t think I am; a new design for a homepage takes about 8 hours, and XHTML and CSS takes about 5, even for fairly simple sites. Then there are all those hours of content bludgeoning, cross-browser tweaking, and custom functionality. It adds up.

But, using a template, I can often get small sites out the door in a single day, at significantly less expense to the nice person paying the bill.

Some designers consider this cheating. I do not, for a few reasons. First of all, I see it as being very similar to buying stock photography or stock vectors, both of which are very standard practice. More importantly, I think there is a skill set in picking templates and stock, and that that skill set has value. Most clients browsing through templates are stuck on the visuals, but choosing the right template for a project is all about the layout. If the structure of the container is right for the content, you can pretty much make it look like anything.

That’s because a good portion of the billed time is usually spent customising the theme’s graphics; The Good Wine Show does not, I like to think, look the same as Prominence, even though the layouts are duplicates. And quite often, even the most perfect templates require at least a few hours of customisation – template makers are obsessed with Java script hover menus, for example, but no hover menu will ever appear on any site I put my name on.

At the same time, I know a lot of designers will never, ever use a template on principle. I completely understand and respect that commitment. But frankly, I also know a lot of designers who bill out considerably more than I do each year. I made a decision a long time ago about the kind of clients I wanted to work with as a freelancer, and that client is most often a small business start-up. While the financial profile of these companies varies, the people behind them are also often broke.

And at my house, even broke people deserve nice websites.

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.

Katherine Nolan and I are delighted to announce that WordCamp Ireland, Ireland’s first conference for WordPress,  is officially launched. We’ve spent a mad few days talking to venues, sponsors and speakers and all systems are go: we’ll be taking over Langton’s Hotel in Kilkenny on March 6th and 7th, 2010 along with 35 speakers, 200 attendees and a metric tonne of swag.

It is going to be a great conference with both excellent speakers and loads of social activities so you don’t sort of get stranded in a corner (we hate that) and is specifically family-friendly so you can bring the whole gang. The venue is also handicap accessible and utterly amazing – we are so excited it’s all come together like this.

This site was a snap to do because Katherine and I work pretty much flawlessly together. I did the pretty, she did the clever, and we’re in total agreement about everything to do with conference organising. It’s like marriage, only perfect :)

PS: Follow @WordCampIRL on Twitter for updates, or see the blog.

This was a slightly unusual project for Niall Harbison, Ireland’s favourite online chef, in that the site was up and running and just needed a visual overhaul. It was grey and blue and had a cool but unclear tab thing in the homepage, and while it was functionally fantastic, it was hard to figure out what exactly VidVend does.

I worked with David Kelly at Ambient Age to make the five day deadline. We re-styled every page with simple but very different CSS changes, and while David sorted out implementing the updates, I re-wrote the copy. Niall mostly got out of the way, made with the money, and wrote me a lovely recommendation on LinkedIn, which was honestly a pretty ace way to work.

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.

A spiffy site for Dublin City Council and the cycling unit at Dublin City Cycling. Articles, blog, events calendar, routes, maps, and an interactive Google map where you can place a pin to suggest a location for a new cycle stand in Dublin. There is voting for specific locations and some nice social media tools to help you pimp your favourite points.

To make the interactive cycle stand map possible, Drupal seemed like the best bet at the time so I worked with my other half, John Handelaar. We are in complete agreement that we are never, ever using Drupal for anything ever again. It was literally hell in a bug-ridden box.

Nevertheless, we completed this site in time to submit it to the Irish Web Awards for Best Government and Council website, but it didn’t make the short list, which is kind of a bummer. But it was fun anyway – the client is happy happy and Anthony McGuinness was a pleasure to work with. Dublin City Council should give him a raise for being a super-hero.

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 finished up work for LittleQuiz.com some time ago, but they were waiting for their swanky swag to arrive so they could launch. For this project, branding, slogan, blog and website design and a bunch of product and print design was done by me; the site and system was coded by the very talented Dave of Ambient Age.

This was definitely a Stalinist web design project but Joe Scanlon is an ideal client and did indeed love what I gave him. It can also be tricky when you’re doing design and someone else is coding, but what Dave turned out looks exactly like the mock ups, to the pixel, and that isn’t easy. Plus his Ajax bits are very sexy.