Truth be told, I am also a proud sister-in-law. But I confess, I’ve been itching a bit to get my hands on Rabia’s site, so I was happy when she said she was ready. Here’s a screen shot of what she had before–pretty simple and clean, but needing some pizzazz.

Rabia is already a super faithful blogger, much better than yours truly. It wasn’t necessary to do anything with her content; we just needed to make the site more faithful to who she is as an author. Yes, Rabia is an author, primarily fantasy, with some fairy tales thrown in…lots of imagination to spare. She actively blogs about writing, homeschooling, and things that pique her interest (like watching Avatar: the Last Airbender with her kids right now). She pretty much gave me permission to do whatever I wanted to, which is always nice.

What I wanted was to give her something that was still clean, professional, and easy on the eyes, but bring in a touch of personality. We’ve incorporated custom fonts, a clean color palette, and custom post types, for starters. Under the hood, where you can’t see them, are some improvements, too: integrated comment threads (because Rabia is fabulous about replying to comments…this functionality is actually built into WordPress already, but she’d been using a plugin to manage it, possibly because of the old theme?); built in search engine optimization tools; and she’s now using the built in WordPress custom menus. We were able to shed several plugins, which may not excite you, but it does me. Mainly, though, the site is more powerful, tidier, and cleaner. And it’s prettier.

Don’t believe me? Check out Rabia Gale, writer at play, in action.

Last year, a friend asked me for help renovating her nonprofit’s website. We spent a month up to our elbows in CSS, WordPress, and new plugins, and I loved it. In the next few months, I was fortunate enough to be asked to see if I could help another small business, and then another, and another, renovate their websites as well. Between homeschooling and photography and this keeping me busy, I’ve hesitated to talk about it much yet, but I’ve decided that I’m ready to start in with a little bit of show and tell, so keep an eye out for some different kinds of work coming from me!

I wanted to start with the website for YouthHOPE, a ministry based here in Fort Myers, but which works with youth workers all over the world. Kristy, their director of communications, called me and asked if I could help them bring some life to their site (see right–that’s a screen shot of their old site) and give them something that they would be able to update for themselves. They were struggling with not being able to update their site as often as they would like, and were feeling pinched by it. It also didn’t really reflect their high energy level and enthusiasm.

We put together their new site, which has a fresh look, and allows them to showcase one of their strengths: they take lots of pictures! We set up a huge image banner on the front page with links to different topics and applications using some of their best imagery. We also set up easy links to their flickr account, and set up a facebook page (Kristy even got inspired and decided they were ready for twitter, too). They are able to blog and update their site regularly, which they do quite faithfully. We’ve also made it easier for them to accept internship applications through their website, which was great because their interns come from all over the country.

I really enjoyed building the custom site for youthHOPE. Looking forward to showing you some more work as well!