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.

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.

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.

The first of a few completed sites I’m late adding to my portfolio. Activate Ireland was a slightly unusual project in that this was an existing site with existing logo, content and layout that just needed to be ported to WordPress and given a new container – a facelift rather than major structural work, if you will. I’m mad keen on the stripes, the flowering growth motif, and the always popular and hilariously named Vag Rounded font.

“Site launch” is a bit of a misnomer, as the functional but fugly Twitter Mosaic was up and running and already getting loads of attention when Walter Higgins asked “What’s your availability? Can you make Twitter Mosaic pretty?” My answer was “My availability is shit, but yes.”

There’s no time like the present, so Guillermo Moreno and I sat down at midnight to see just how fast we could get design, XHTML and CSS out the door, and Walter woke up six hours later to a brand new Twitter Mosaic.

Michael Kane of CuriousWines.ie had a spec for his website that looked like a €25,000 custom back end job. Working with ecommerce goddess Katherine Nolan, we were able to pull 95% of his wishlist out of the bag with a heavily hacked off the shelf ecommerce system for a tiny fraction of that cost. We also added some very cool features like product tagging and reviews along the way to create a nicely dynamic site.

They’re launching with a very cool giveaway contest for Christmas, and a special 24 hour discount code on Twitter, too!

WeddingDates.ie allows couples to search for available reception venues across Ireland by date and by county. It’s a simple idea that turned into a powerhouse website, and I’m delighted for Ciara Crossan, who has enough energy and enthusiasm for 12 people and will totally drive this to success. Front end design by me, back end Django development by Python god Bartosz Ptaszynski.

The site soft-launched a few weeks ago, but today rolled out a really interesting survey on the recession and wedding budgets, with a very cool prize draw. So if you’re engaged, go check it out and maybe win a swanky hotel get away and golf package!

An updated look for my favourite client and the godfather of Irish telecoms, Pat Phelan. It was a nice surprise to see MAXroam launch their new website this morning. The site redesign coincides with MAXroam’s new mobile data roaming rates, which have already been called a “giant killer” so congrats to the MAXroam team.

It is entirely possible I have been waiting my entire life to do a website for a circus, because I can’t think of a site that’s been more fun to build or a site in my portfolio that I love more than Circus Vegas. The design was just enormously delightful to create, and even though the poor client had to wait a completely rediculous six months, we both think it was worth it. Features a CSS layout and a WordPress blog all about the facinating world of circus life.

I don’t know about you, but the minute I hear the words “used car sales” I brace myself for a deeply unpleasant experience. So we worked hard to put together a site that would set BetterCars.ie apart from its unfortunate cousins in the used car market. Interestingly, although you cannot purchase vehicles online, this site is built on an ecommerce platform – we’ve simply ripped the financial transaction part out and taken full advantage of the cataloguing system. (The site also features a blog, though it’s currently a bit unloved.)