I’m very happy to say that the Great Barrington Waldorf High School, where my son Harry is finishing his freshman year, has a new web site designed around the school’s colors and logo. The site has been using WordPress for a number of years, so redesigning was a matter of selecting a new theme and customizing that theme. I selected the Education Child theme in the Genesis Framework from StudioPress which I love working with! The site also has a number of new features, I’ve added a school calendar and am using a widget which displays today’s and upcoming events, in the sidebar. I’ll be adding more features, making some information handy and readily available to parents, both current and prospective, as well as students, and definitely more photos throughout the site.
Great Barrington Waldorf High School
Robin Leech Real Estate
I’m pleased to announce my newest website launch! The Robin Leech Real Estate web site was ready for a redesign and I have enjoyed the whole creative process from looking at other real estate agent web sites to developing the new site using WordPress…. and now to the debut. The site’s home page has a spot, front and center, for Featured Properties with more properties underneath. I made having properties on the home page, immediately viewable, one of my top priorities with the new site. Using WordPress means it is very easy to keep the information on the site up to date, another priority. (I love WordPress!)
The site also has a specialized Search which allows visitors to look at properties, by property type – residential, land, commercial, and rental, as well as by location and even to limit the search results by price or number of bedrooms. Each property has an unique web site id assigned to it and can be looked up in the Search by that id. On the individual property page, a gallery of photos is viewable along with the pertinent information and features of the property.
Check out this latest web site by w3sights! I’d love to hear what you think! Maybe you’ll be compelled to call Robin and see… and buy… one of the many magnificent houses on the market in the beautiful northwest corner of Connecticut.
The Possibility Project
City at Peace is now officially “The Possibility Project” Their new name reflects their growth and their evolving mission since the founding of City at Peace 16 years ago in Washington, DC, and the beginnings of their national effort in New York City 10 years ago. With their new name, they wanted a new web site and I was happy to be selected to set up a site using WordPress, of course. I say of course because WordPress is what I prefer to work with these days and has become my de facto standard for many reasons. You’re pretty much covered for SEO using WordPress, for one. With so many plugins written for WordPress a site can be extended to do almost anything you imagine. Not to mention the fact that WordPress is trully user-friendly, so web site owners can do a lot of updating themselves.
The new Possibility Project uses a plugin with a name that I love – Hackadelic Widget Voodoo. Go to “The Possibility Project” and click on the black sub headings in the sidebar to see it in action. And that’s not it! Pages throughout the site with a lot of text have sections or chapters that are collapsible, too, making for a very neat appearance and allowing a visitor to go directly to and only read what they want to without sifting through long pages. See an example on the Cities page. Thank you to Zoran, the author of this plugin for making both sections in the sidebar and on the page into “cool, collapsible, AJAX-type citizens”.
Visit the Gallery to see images from recent productions, original musicals and images from community action projects. Here you will see what The Possibility Project envisions – A society where teenagers are valued, respected and play a leading role in creating a better world. There are many ways to get involved such as volunteering, donating, attending a show, or joining the project if you area teenager in New York City or one of the locations with Possibility Projects.
After working hard on this site to have it ready for launching on August 2nd, it was gratifying to receive an email from Kelly thanking me and saying that the site looked great and that everything went smoothly.
Salisbury Forum
I was pleased to work with the local non-profit organization, The Salisbury Forum, and design a new web site for them. I was asked to make the site look and feel like their posters and brochures; I choose WordPress as the infrastructure. I set up two categories: Events and News, and the site’s Home page highlights the most recent posts in each. A comment about the site: “The website looks super sharp, easily navigable; the photos are terrific, the info is easily accessed and digested.” Visit the new Salisbury Forum site and let me know what you think!
Great Barrington Rudolf Steiner School
The web site for the Great Barrington Rudolf Steiner School was developed using WordPress as a Content Management System. The Home page features a News and Events category in which the 5 most current news and events posts automatically appear. In addition, the content throughout the site can easily be updated now that the site is based on WordPress! Some new features that I added to the site were WordPress categories for Alumni Profiles, Parent Perspectives, and Mosaic Newsletters, along with News and Events. WordPress is designed to be Search Engine Optimization (SEO) friendly and this is as important for a school as it is for a business.
Local Farm
The Local Farm web site is now powered by WordPress. This makes it infinitely easier to update! The Home page of the site is set up to automatically display the three most recent news and events posts. The other pages on the site are static, but can easily be updated by logging into Admin. The site uses NextGen for its photo galleries.
City at Peace – New York
City at Peace is a national non-profit organization that uses the performing arts to empower teenagers to create safe, healthy, peaceful lives and communities. Several years ago I began working on the National web site for City at Peace and recently was asked to work on the New York site:
I am writing to you at the suggestion of Paul Griffin, with whom I work and who has recommended you highly. I am reaching out to you in the hopes that you would consider taking on CP-NY as your client and work your magic for us in the same loving and creative way that you have for CP-National! We have a functioning website, but not only do I need someone superbly professional and talented to help keep the information flowing on our site, but I am also considering having our site redesigned to mirror/match CP-National’s fabulously functional and eye grabbing site. We have many projects under development that would mean expanding our site and important updates every couple of months and when I mentioned to Paul that I needed someone who could do this work and tackle the bigger design work, who is excited by, and deeply respectful of the work we do (and frankly our limited funds!), you were who he raved about…
In this redesign project I used WordPress as a CMS (Content Management System) to accommodate and keep all the information easily up to date. The Home page has both a slide show and an YouTube video. The most recent news and events items are automatically displayed on the Home page, when no longer displayed news items are accessible because they are automatically archived. NextGen is being used for the show photos and the Youth Corner contains important information.
Mountain Laurel Waldorf School
w3sights redesigned the Mountain Laurel Waldorf School using WordPress so that the site could be easily updated at the school. The site features artwork done by an alumnus and many photographs taken by a professional photographer and parent at the school. I set up a random image generator on the Home page. The four most recent news and events items will automatically be displayed on the home page, as well. The site is based on the Revolution Pro Business WordPress theme.