Clickcase is one of many sites that have gone live in the last year that I have not had time to blog or add to my portfolio, but it’s one of my two favourites so I thought I’d portfolio it up. Plus, they are selling awesome accessories for iPads and iPhones right here in Ireland, and you may want to bundle some under your yule tree!

I’ll be honest and say that this project was hard going. The client brief was pretty liquid, and we started from scratch in terms of name, logo and design. That can end in one of two ways: creative bliss or Shakespearean tragedy. Luckily, after 15 years of doing this, I have a pretty high batting average and get it right first go more than 98% of the time. But the first design we did for the site just didn’t come together in a way you could really hang a brand on, so Katherine and I threw it out and started over. And by “threw it out” I mean threw out the whole thing – logo, design and build. The whole thing.

Happily, it’s a bit like childbirth in that it can feel like it will never end when you’re going through it, but then it’s all over, you’re mightily pleased with the results, and it all seems worth it. Both Katherine and I and the client love the site, which features all the usual ecommerce suspects plus agile product tagging, snazzy product images, inline product question forms and lots of really nice features all over. WordPress is silently integrated to provide more robust content management for non-product pages than our cart offers out of the box. There’s also a swanky Facebook page to go with.

In an interesting sidenote, after choosing and registering the clickcase.ie domain, we were able to score the already-owned clickcase.com domain for an unprecedented $60. I have picked up aftermarket domains for clients from $250 – $750 (I won’t spend more) but getting your .com for $60 has to be the bargain of the century.

Finally, after 30 years of rejecting Apple products, I have been seduced by the kitchen potential of the Speck Handyshell and would dearly like one for Christmas. And an iPad to go with it…

(PS: Yes, yes they do have Dodo Cases. You Apple people are so pervy.)

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 had no idea what a handbag hanger was when Mark Renwick called me about doing a site for his range of handbag hangers and charms, but as soon as a package of chic, sparkly, girly goodness arrived at my door, all became clear. Slightly more complicated than understanding what would go on the site was naming it; we went through what felt like 97 brands (and I even appealed to Twitter for help!) before landing on BAGglitz.com.

Anyway, it launched last week in it’s all its swanky glory, and is a very nice shopping spot when you’re looking for gifts for your girlfriends. They offer completely free shipping anywhere in the world, which makes it a great one to stick in your bookmarks for those last minute gifts sent straight to the recipient.

This site features ecommece with Realex integration and complete product, order and inventory management. Design, branding and logo by me; life-saving support provided by Katherine Nolan.

If you take a basic skill like learning to knit, traditionally you were taught across generations by your close family circle. The world doesn’t so much work that way any more, and there are tons of things I want to know how to do you may be able to teach me, from container gardening to makeup application to driving. I like the ability to list and market lessons to make money, but mostly I like the idea of learning from my neighbours and meeting new people this way.

Site is a mashup of off-the-shelf directory software plus WordPress and BuddyPress. Soft launched a few weeks ago, it was long-listed for the Irish Web Awards in Best New Web App and was already covered in the Irish Times!

Shiny new ecommerce to go with glittering, opulent jewellery for luxury retailer VSL Jewelry. The site has a custom front end and an off the shelf ecommerce back end, with WordPress and Campaign Monitor bolted on to provide tertiary services with no custom development overhead.

This was something of a “lux” project for me as I had a free hand with design, was given a CD crammed full of spectacular professionally shot images, got to name products and write absolute tonnes of lush copy, and basically delivered an end to end online brand. Victoria Shorten is a great client to work with – and I am not just saying that so she’ll give me a NY STACK bracelet set.

Late night PHP and CSS bailouts from Katherine Nolan and John Handelaar. Coffee actually delivered to my house by Ciara Crossan. Launch contest inspired by my own covetous desire.

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.