I just read a really interesting article on Huffington Post about how comedians are using Twitter to build a following.

When clients ask me “Should I be on Twitter?” I tell them “It depends if you’re going to use it. Then it depends how you’re going to use it” You can’t build a Twitter following without being funny, clever or helpful. No one cares if you need a cup of coffee. It’s not Facebook. These people are not necessarily your friends. All you have are words and a limited number of them so you’d better get creative if you want someone to follow you.

For comics Twitter is a wonderful opportunity to show how smart and funny you can be in just 140 characters. It can be tricky. But if your craft revolves around entertaining people with your words then isn’t Twitter a great tool and a teacher? If you can hone some one-liners into 140 characters you can build a following.

You should be aiming for something that will get retweeted by your current followers. That is one of the best way to pick up new fans. Remember to leave enough room that someone can stick RT @yourtwittername in front of your tweet.

I guess it’s not gonna work for prop comics….unless you attach a photo….

You can read Eric Schmeltzer’s article in full here.

David is taking his time creating the exact look and feel for his new website. In the meantime he wanted to have an “under construction” sign that didn’t look, well, lame.

Luckily those clever chaps at Elegant Themes have a neat solution.

The Anticipate template very cleverly sits as a placeholder on your website. It’s actually a plugin so you can add a regular template and work on it and be able to see previews of it while you’re logged in as an Administrator while the Anticipate template is visible to the rest of the world.

You are able to include links to Twitter, Facebook and your RSS feed as well as an email form to capture new visitors while you build your site. And the counter at the top gives folks an idea of when your site will go live.  Neat, no?

Often, especially if I am revamping a previous incarnation of a website, clients are worried that a visitor will be put off by the half-baked version of their new website if they happen to stumble upon it. Here is an elegant solution from my favourite template company.

We have worked together on the Toronto comedy scene and when she found out I built websites she took me out for lunch to discuss her requirements. I asked her to take a look at Elegant Themes and she immediately chose the template TheStyle:

Close - but no cigar...

Veronika loved the magazine-style layout. The emphasis on visuals really appealed to her, but she wasn’t too fond of the colour schemes available. Luckily for both of us the Elegant Themes templates can be easily customized to suit the individual.

I began by changing the colours of the links and blog post categories. Compare the type, headlines and category elements above to the image on the left. Veronika was very clear that she wanted hot pink elements so I chose a colour and changed the coding in the theme to match links and the main font to that colour.

I also created an image file to replace the one in the theme that sits behind the blog category (the pink rectangle behind “Sorry Dad” in the picture on the left) so that it would match the theme colours and I built a logo using a cartoon of Veronika‘s burlesque character Priscilla Pussycat.

Veronika is very aware of the power of social networking and asked me to add three icons to her header next to her logo – for Facebook, Twitter and her RSS feed. I created pink icons to match her site’s colour scheme and linked them to her fan page, Twitter account and RSS feed accordingly. We also used the Facebook “Like” plugin which includes a “like” or “recommend” button on each of the blog posts – an invaluable viral marketing tool for any website.

Veronika Swartz's website - a thing of beauty

Veronika‘s website is eye-catching and suits her personality perfectly. It was a pleasure building it with her and I’m very proud of the results.

Before...........

Barbara’s husband had built her original website for her and although it was functional it simply wasn’t fabulous enough – it didn’t have a blog and Barbara had no idea how to update it herself. She was attracted to the simple content management system of WordPress and its flexibility and extended functionality. And lo – the new website was born.

...after!

Barbara liked the papery texture of the Bold theme from Elegant Themes which fits nicely with the subject matter.

I created a logo similar to the one in the theme demo at Elegant Themes with the extra added bonus of her face – she liked similar logos I created for David Schneider and my own personal website. We cut out some of the white space above the header so that more of the page would show up “before the fold”.

Originally I created some content that I took from Barbara’s original site to get something up quickly – Barbara had a press release going out regarding her latest novel and needed the website to be functioning fast. Then, at her leisure, she slowly began learning how to create and manipulate the content herself.

After much back and forth regarding the home page layout Barbara opted for a static page with top line information about her latest book – this is, after all, the most important piece of work right now.

She linked the image of the book directly to Amazon.ca so that her visitors could buy it easily.

Barbara has added a lot of her journalism material plus a whole pile of blog posts from an extended trip to London, back-dating entries from previous years giving the site some good depth and breadth. Visitors can get a real feel for her writer’s “voice” through professional pieces and more personal writing.

If the terms “social marketing”, “web 2.0″ and “linkbait” are all things you think you should probably know about, but don’t, then this free ebook is for you.

I first came across the Authority Black Book last year and tore through it. I’ll be brutally honest with you – for the first time ever I really and truly got to grips with social marketing and understood how to build traffic to my website using strategies I never knew existed.

I highly recommend that anyone who’s interested in understanding what all those terms at the top of this article mean download a copy and start learning how to make their website into an authority presence.

This book really is a free resource and doesn’t come with strings attached – you can sign up for a monthly subscription to a whole gigantic website full of information at Blog Success, but if I were you I would just get your head around the Authority Black Book first! Click hereto download the book.

Sack the webmaster

One of the reasons I started this business was to save people from the tyranny of webmasters.

Don’t get me wrong – I understand how useful they can be for big businesses – they can afford a whole IT department! I just don’t think that a small business or a one-man-band should have to rely on an outside contractor to update your website.

A girlfriend of mine (we’ll call her Isabel to protect her identity and that of her business) is the poster child for a bad webmaster experience. She’s a sole proprietor who runs her very successful corporate training business from home.

In 2009 Isabel wanted to rebuild and update her website, so she laid out $5,000 to have it revamped by a local designer who was recommended to her.

The designer (we’ll call him $5K Guy) wanted to sell Isabel the sort of website he thought she should have. He told Isabel he was willing to collaborate, but instead of brainstorming he insisted that Isabel send him all the text for her website and then only presented her with one design that he had laboriously applied to whole website. Isabel told me:

In the design business, the protocol is to provide three rough designs on just the home page to get a feel for where the client wants to go. I felt pressured into saying yes because he had done so much work on the one design; it was a “fine” design but I wanted to explore other choices. For $5,000 I should get more than one choice!

Isabel is not particularly technically skilled although she knows her way around desktop applications and Facebook. $5K Guy was not willing to discuss ways to make the site do what she wanted it to do. He mystified the process and was impatient when it came to helping her to understand how the site would work. She told me:

I realize now, after the fact, that his knowledge of the technology was limited, so his strategy was to guide me away from (or just ignore) requests that were outside his capabilities. Sneaky bugger. I’m not saying all webmasters use this strategy but it exists. When they say “it can’t be done,” the client should ask “Do you mean NO ONE can do it, or just YOU can’t do it because you don’t have the expertise?”

The final straw came when Isabel wanted to make some changes to her site. Unlike the sites I build with WordPress, Isabel’s site doesn’t have an easily accessed content management system she can use – so she had to go to the webmaster.

I sent him an e-mail with three small changes. In two cases he had to substitute a sentence with a new one I provided (simple cut and paste) and in one case he had to add a new bullet point containing one word. I expected a minimum charge of one hour, which is $150 — already a big hit for three lines.

$5K Guy tried to charge her $300 to make the changes. Isabel is philosophical about her experience:

I have learned from my $5,000 lesson. I’m not going to paint all webmasters with the same brush (that’s unfair) but I’ll say what I suspect about the “dodgy” ones.

1. They tell you everything is mysterious and difficult so you’ll pay the big bucks for their expertise. In some cases, this is true. In many cases, it is not. They’re taking advantage of your lack of knowledge!
2. If you get a static site thinking you won’t ever want to change it, you are probably fantasizing. As soon as something in your world changes, you’ll want to go into your website and update it. If you have a static site, you’ll start paying the expense called “author’s changes”. You can get pages that are “content managed” which means you can make changes but this feature is just as easily achieved on WordPress without all the fuss and expense.
3. My biggest mistake is that I over-bought. My website didn’t need the kind of features that $5K buys. It’s just an online brochure. I thought I was buying $5K worth of design talent and technical expertise. I could have gotten what I got for a lot less somewhere else. I just didn’t have the time or energy to shop around. So, voilà, I got screwed.

All in all, if I had known earlier what I know now, I would have hired Marilla for 500 bucks (WordPress could have worked for me) and taken myself on a nice vacation with the other $4.5K.

It’s ironic to have to use a close friend as an example. I hadn’t started my business until after Isabel started the process of redoing her site with $5K Guy. But she is an unfortunate example of why I feel very strongly that it shouldn’t cost $5,000 to get a nice looking website that does exactly what you want it to do and that you can update yourself quite easily.

If you have a story to tell please comment below or go to my contact page and I’ll share it with my readers.

When she came to me she already had a website for her company, Creative Expeditions, but wanted to add a blog where she could provide both a great resource for her existing clients and attract new clients by showcasing her ideas and ways of working. Making changes to her core website was not easy so an add-on blog seemed like the best solution.

Adding a WordPress blog appealed to Inge because:

1. she had read how websites which have regularly added fresh content are favoured by search engines who keep revisiting to catalogue the new additions and
2. she needed a section of her website that had an easy-to navigate content management system so she could quickly add and change content for her current and future clients to access.

The challenge for me as a website builder was to match the blog section “Focus and Flow” to an already existing website.

Inge's original website

First I installed the WordPress blog in a folder called “blog” on Inge’s existing website host server and Inge placed a link from her core website to the add-on.

Inge chose a simple theme – in this case, Who’s Who from Elegant Themes. I then set about changing the colours, fonts and other elements to match her existing website as closely as possible.

This is how the template looked before I monkeyed around with it.

There was a lot of code-fiddling and many questions posted on the Elegant Themes support forum to get this theme to work in exactly the way we wanted it to. Eventually we came up with something that integrated nicely with the other part of Inge’s website. Since Inge is trained in graphic design she was very specific about what she wanted the blog to look like and where she wanted the elements to be positioned. It’s great when someone knows exactly what they want – it makes the end result so much more satisfying when you get it right.

Inge's blog: Focus and Flow

Inge’s blog “Focus and Flow” is a wealth of great tips and resources, not just for use in the corporate environment but also for anyone with a drop of creative juice in their bodies. If you’re stuck for ideas, need some inspiration or triggers for that next direction in your work, check out Focus and Flow.

Personality-Types.net

The PURE System of Personality Typing is a program I developed following ten years of experience in the corporate training world. Three years ago I recorded a comprehensive set of training CDs and along with a 100-page workbook I had a pretty nice product. It was designed to appeal to small business owners who can’t afford thousands of dollars for a training company to come in and overhaul their business communications.

At that time I was heavily involved in local business groups and sales were good. Then my circumstances changed as my acting work really took off and the PURE System took a back seat.

A couple of weeks ago a woman who had seen one of my presentations got in touch with me requesting a copy of the system. I suddenly realized I had a potential goldmine on my hands and couldn’t believe I hadn’t built a proper website to promote something I’d put so much work into. After all, it only cost me the price of a domain name from GoDaddy – my business package hosting from Hostgator allows me unlimited domains hosted on one account (and also unlimited bandwidth and unlimited disk space) – what was I waiting for?

I got really excited when I took a fresh look at the latest templates from Elegant Themes – Nick’s newest offering (at the time of writing) was absolutely perfect!

The MyProduct theme is designed for businesses looking to showcase their products and services. It has a great feature where you can upload pictures of your products that visitors can scroll through using a series of buttons. You can describe your product features in the tabbed area under the header and outline your services in the four sections below the tabbed section.

A blog is easy to add and I will be doing this in the near future with hints and tips on using the PURE System in domestic and business situations. Looking further ahead, when I have sold all of my physical products, I will be uploading the audio files and offering the system as a subscription service with password-protected areas accessible only by those whose subscriptions are current.

I’m excited to have revived a business model I’d put on the back burner. It only took me a few days to build the site using all of the material that I’d written a few years ago and it only cost me ten bucks to buy the domain name. Elegant Themes had the perfect look and feel for my site and I’m thrilled with how it turned out. What small business idea do you have that could be revived by a gorgeous-looking website?

A familiar face on the Toronto performance scene, Jeff has many strings to his bow and a few places of his own on the internet already. But what he really needed was a grown-up site that showcased his performance life.
Jeff took a look at websites that I have put together already and at the Elegant Themes website for an idea of what kind of structure and design would fit his new site.

The scrolling boxes were a bit too busy for Jeff

He rather liked the look of The Seahorse Shop, but instead of the scrolling top box with Random Posts, Comments and Lifestream plugin he wanted a Featured Articles slider.

The featured articles slider - a quieter alternative

This way Jeff has more control over the content his visitors see first “before the fold”.

The events calendar and sidebar widget

Another feature Jeff chose was the Calendar plugin which comes complete with an Upcoming Events sidebar widget. A great option for performers who want to let their visitors know when their next show, concert or gig is coming up.

Bad widget!

When I first installed the plugin I had a problem with the widget sitting nicely in the sidebar. The title bar was sticking out and I couldn’t figure out how to make it appear flush with the right-hand side of sidebar. Luckily one quick post on the Elegant Themes support forum was all it took to sort it out – within a couple of hours one of the moderators replied with a bit of code that fixed the problem right away. This is one of the reasons I recommend Elegant Themes to all of my clients – their themes are delicious and their support is second-to-none. I am able to tweak and adjust templates to suit my clients quickly and easily with the help of the technical geniuses at Elegant Themes.

WPAudio - a great little plugin

Being a spoken word artist Jeff needed to have examples of his work on the site and so he uploaded some mp3 files to the server. However, the links for the files opened up another page with a dull, grey player on it. I installed the plugin WPAudio MP3 Player which automatically creates cute little players in the page without opening up a new page.

I’m really pleased with the way Jeff’s page turned out. It draws all of his performance work into a professional-looking web presence where friends and fans can track his upcoming appearances.

Normally when consulting with a new client with quite different interests that they want to showcase on a website I advise them to break the topics up into two or perhaps three sites, but Victoria’s blogging voice is so strong and the subjects of her blog so integrated that in this case I decided that we should keep everything together.
When she asked me to build a website for her she already had a blog but wanted something a little more sophisticated and better-looking. Here’s what her old blog looked like:

WordPress has an excellent feature allowing you to import a blog from somewhere else so Victoria’s is the first website I’ve built where the bulk of the content was already created – all I had to do was ask WordPress to grab it from Blogger. It took about twenty minutes to populate Victoria’s new site with all of her blog posts. More time-consuming was optimizing all of Victoria’s pictures to look their best in the new website using the thumbnail feature of the Glow theme from Elegant Themes.

I built a montage of images using Photoshop to add to the header and showcase the different themes of Victoria’s site:

and made the image translucent so that the stars from the original Glow theme header would still shine through. I think the Glow theme in green is a great choice for this site and I enjoyed matching up the Twitter widget to complement the gorgeous colour. Compare Victoria’s website to Hoot ‘n Annie’s who have the same theme but in red.

I’m really pleased with how the website turned out – it’s visually very striking and fits Victoria’s personality and subject matter extremely well. If you’re a single parent, cooking enthusiast or environmentalist why not sign up for her blog updates by email? Simply go to Victoria’s website and enter your email address into the Feedburner widget in the sidebar.

Dave Schneider.co.uk - a blog-driven website

Dave’s original site, DaveSchneider.co.uk, celebrates David’s work as an actor, writer and comedian and is very blog-driven. With a huge Twitter following (of nearly 25,000 at the time of writing) it’s important to have his tweets prominently displayed. The emphasis is on constantly changing content with a lot of video on the blog and topical tweets in the sidebar.

2ActWrite - a traditional, static site

Wulfnoth - a family history structured around a blog

By way of contrast his second website is more of a traditional, static site showcasing the personal coaching services offered by his company, 2 Act Write, to writers and performers.

He chose the same same theme as Bob Woolner’s family history site – ColdStone from Elegant Themes – but since he is not using the theme as a blog it looks and behaves quite differently.

2ActWrite.com is simply comprised of a handful of static pages with a couple of external links to Dave’s personal website and Sandy’s resume. Its clean, uncluttered design presents core information clearly and consisely without any extraneous bells and whistles to distract from the business message.

When they approached me Sruli and Lisa already had a domain name (www.hootnannie.us) and a rudimentary website (see below), but were frustrated at not being able to update their site themselves. Every change came with a price tag and a lengthy wait (if you haven’t read it already, check out the horror story “Webmaster? No thank you!“)

The old Hoot 'n Annie site - fugly.

Because Hoot ‘n Annie bill themselves playing “America’s Greatest songs on America’s weirdest instruments”  we wanted a real red, white and blue theme for the site. Sruli and Lisa chose the Glow theme in red from Elegant Themes which has a background of stars in the header and I built a logo in Photoshop using the Rockwell with a blue to white gradient which really added to the Americana theme. To top it all off I miniaturized a US flag and used it as their favicon.

Delicious pictures can really make your website stand out

We decided to use the slider available in the Glow theme to showcase three great professional promotional shots Sruli and Lisa had and used their terrific review soundbites in the caption section of the slider.

Music is clearly what these guys are selling and it was important to find a way to present examples of Hoot ‘n Annie’s work.

The Audio Player in red, white and blue.

We began by using the plugin Audio Player and although the player it creates was very cute (and we customized it to make it red, white and blue), we found we couldn’t use it in a widget.This forced me to do some more plugin research (always a good thing because I find lots of new and great stuff I wouldn’t otherwise know about) I found WP Audio which simply converts links to mp3 files uploaded to your website to a player.

WPAudio - a great widget solution

It worked well in the Hoot ‘n Annie sidebar where we could create a text widget and simply add the links to the mp3 files, one under the other. By default the player is blue, so we didn’t need to do any code-tweaking since it fit well with the website’s theme. More players have been added on static pages with six songs on the Santa Paws page where Hoot ‘n Annie talk about their doggie versions of holiday favourites.

Sruli and Lisa have been very pro-active with their website and it’s been a real joy working with them. They now have a web presence showcasing their work, their glowing testimonials are now available for all to see and a contact page means that their email addresses are safe from spambots.

Joanne came to me in the middle of her tour of “Fiddler on the Roof” when the show came to Toronto. In just two days we built her website from top to bottom.

Lush and Hora - a joke in Yiddish!

She liked the hand-drawn look of the On the Go theme from Elegant Themes in purple and edited the flying man image in the header herself to include the words “Lush and Hora” (a pun in Yiddish).

Joanne very quickly got to grips with the WordPress software and although at first she wasn’t sure if she’d be a regular blogger she’s really taken to recording her tour on her website.

She has been adding every show date to her Calendar – a great plugin which includes a widget showing upcoming events in the sidebar.

Joanne was a joy to work with and I’m very pleased that her new website has received so many complimentary comments from friends and colleagues.

A familiar face on British TV, he is also a friend. I was excited when he contacted me through Facebook – how lovely to build a website for a mate whose work I really like!

It was an interesting challenge working with a client who’s a couple of thousand miles away in a different time zone (five hours ahead of me), but it actually proved to be surprisingly easy. Through a combination of Skype, email and Twitter direct messaging we were able to communicate and work together really well.

At the beginning of the process Dave gave me a couple of examples of websites that he liked which was great because it very quickly helped me understand what he wanted his website to do and how he wanted it to look. We tried a couple of themes before we settled on eBusiness from Elegant Themes (the Smooth Blue option).

Since Dave’s Twitter presence is so big it was pretty vital we found a decent-looking widget for his tweets. Having played with quite a few I actually plumped for the one that Twitter themselves provide – I tweaked the colours to match Dave’s site. Dave wanted to take this one stage further and produced a page called the Twitter Hall of Fame where he listed his favourite tweets. I produced a simple button to match the look of Twitter under the actual Twitter widget.

Dave wanted to remove the post categories bar (which appeared under the buttons in the original theme – look at my Chihuahua website to see an example where the bar has been left in) and add the categories alongside the static page buttons. Now all the pages and the blog post categories appear as buttons at the top of the page.

I tweaked the coding in the homepage php file so that Dave could have a static welcome message which always appears above his blog posts. We didn’t want a huge logo or big pictures in the header so we decided that something further down the page would be good.

David Schneider as Tony Le Mesmer

I taught Dave how to use his website over Skype and he’s been really proactive in creating blog posts and pages, embedding YouTube and Vimeo videos, uploading dozens of pictures and asking lots of intelligent questions about how to get the most out of his website. It’s been a fantastically satisfying learning curve for me – Dave is the best kind of perfectionist. He’s pushed me to find ways of making the theme work exactly how he wanted it to. To provide the functionality he needed I’ve discovered better plugins. We’re both really pleased with the end result and I wish him all the best with the success of Dave Schneider.co.uk.

He contacted me via his son-in-law and said that he had been thinking of having a website built for a long time, but had no idea how to go about it. When I asked him what he wanted the site to be about he identified a few areas of interest: his legal practice, his smallholding in Northern Ontario, his family history and his interest in particular musical instruments. I suggested that it would be sensible to divide these topics into separate websites since they were fairly diverse in nature. An unfocused website can alienate visitors and hurt your traffic. When I asked Bob which area he was most interested in working on first he told me he’d written a book chronicling the Woolner family history.

Isaac Woolner

By his own admission Bob isn’t hugely computer literate, but took on the task of learning a new skill eagerly and quickly broke his book down into chapters which formed the categories of his blog. He chose the Coldstone theme from Elegant Themes which fits the theme of the site nicely – it has a slightly gothic feel and I complemented this with a logo created with the Blackadder font.

One of the interesting aspects of putting a book like Bob’s online in a blog format is that, as I explained to him, you cannot guarantee that your audience is going to read it chronologically. Also information needs to be delivered in “bite-sized chunks” – a lot of text on the screen is difficult to process. People just don’t read information online in the same way that they would read a book. Bob took all this in his stride and broke down the text into manageable portions, grouped by theme using blog categories.

There is still a lot of the book to be posted on the Wulfnoth site but Bob is maintaining an excellent schedule. We have conducted all of the training over the phone with follow-up emails. Our hope is that his website will help him find other branches of his family and more pieces of the puzzle.

The seahorse – elusive, threatened and endlessly fascinating to the enthusiast.

My husband and I have always loved them. Our dream one day is to own a seahorse aquarium. As I read and learned more about seahorses it seemed only natural for me to build a website about them.

The Seahorse Shop is a pure labour of love – I add content about seahorse keeping, seahorses in the wild, seahorse arts and crafts – anything and everything to do with seahorses.

The Seahorse Shop

I chose the LightSource theme from Elegant Themes in blue. It has nice deep blue and green accents and seemed perfect for the subject matter.

I enjoy the Lifestream plugin that comes as a feature with this template – I’m always finding seahorse-related arts and crafts online which I might not want to write an entire blog post on, but with my seahorseshop Twitter account I can simply tweet about my finds and they pop up in Lifestream.

If you’d like to build a hobby website then please contact me for details.

I’ve been and gone and done it again.

Last night I was in a bad mood (I was filming a commercial all day Monday and so yesterday I had post-performance blues) and instead of eating my own body-weight in Cheetos I decided to do something practical – revamp my personal website.

I’d been feeling for a while as if my website looked a bit cluttered and, well, purple. Now don’t get me wrong – I love purple (half my wardrobe is purple), but I was kind of tired of it overwhelming my blog.

PURPLE! THIS WEBSITE IS PURPLE!

I wanted something cleaner, quieter and well, just different! It was time for a change and luckily for me with Elegant Themes I can download and install as many different themes as I want on as many of my websites as I choose for only $39 a year. Bargain!

Sleek and clean - me likey.

I chose the PersonalPress theme (a fairly new one from Elegant Themes) – Nick has gone back to basics to create a theme for an upfront blog instead of a the more static designs he’s favoured recently. PersonalPress is designed to be used with WordPress 3.0 (which is still being Beta tested) so I manually installed 3.0 in order to use all of the features. I like how the pages have taglines created in the new WordPress menu options.

Disembodied head - nice.

I designed a new logo using an old headshot and a tagline that I use on my business cards. It’s a take off of a department store chain in England who claim to be “never knowingly undersold”.

I had to re-colour my tagcloud widget and the next job is re-colouring my table that I use for my resume. But I managed to get a lot done last night and am rather pleased with the results. What do you think?

Farfl the Wonderdog is a 3.5lb Chihuahua. Her breed-specific website has a wealth of information for Chihuahua owners.

Even before I brought Farfl home I built a website for her. When I was doing my research I couldn’t really find much online that wasn’t just a spammy site filled with the same badly-written articles as the next spammy site. Frustrated, I determined to create a website not just about my dog, but as a resource for other Chihuahua owners in the hope that they would find information on my website that wasn’t readily available elsewhere.

I chose the eBusiness theme in Radiate Blue from Elegant Themes. Its clean style was perfect – nothing to distract from the information being presented.

I’ve included videos, pictures and stories about Farfl and other Chihuahuas, included anecdotal stuff as well as examples of products and services that I have found useful. It’s sometimes hard to find gear for a three and a half pound pooch!

I’ve had a lot of great feedback from other Chihuahua owners and people who are looking into the breed. It’s very satisfying to fill a niche and to feel like you’re providing a useful resource for others.

Okay, I admit it. I can’t leave my personal website alone.

Here’s the second in the series of “before and after” pictures of websites I’ve built to give you an idea of what I might be able to do for you. This case study features my own website which I use to promote myself as an actress and a stand-up comedian. When I first built my website I used Kompozer, a free WYSIWYG website design tool from Mozilla of Firefox fame. It had the basic information up there – links to my resume, showreel, a contact page, the blog etc. but, let’s face it, it wasn’t pretty:

Before......

Originally I just hosted it at the free AOL webspace I had with my old email account and tacked on a WordPress blog to it, then when I started building BANS sites and could host unlimited sites with Hostgator I put it up with all my BANS sites.

After I discovered Elegant Themes and realized I could rebuild my site with the blog as the main focus wrapped up in a gorgeous template I went about rebuilding it and realized I could get a lot more bang for buck with the Elegant Themes flexibility.

....after!

There’s a lot going on visually using the Featured Articles and thumbnail features available in the Cion theme, but the layout is still neat and easily navigated while being attractive. I’ve had lots of great compliments from other actors, casting directors and other colleagues in the business. What do you think?

When Michael Wex’s first book hit the New York Times best-seller list he needed a web presence fast.

I thought it would be interesting for you to see “before and after” pictures of websites I’ve built to give you an idea of what I might be able to do for you.

The first case study is my husband, Michael Wex. When I built his first website I knew next to nothing about coding, HTML, how a website is constructed etc. etc. so I used a webhost that has a fairly straightforward “building block” system of construction for beginners, SiteBuildIt. This was the result:

Before.......

I have nothing against SiteBuildIt – it taught me a heckuvalot about building websites. It just ended up looking a little clunky and ugly compared to the scrumptious and seemingly endless themes available for use with WordPress sites. Ironically I’d rebuilt my own website and put up a couple of others before someone suggested that I tackle my husband’s. It just looked so lame compared to the others, so I dove in and here’s what happened:

....after!

I used a theme called Cherry Truffle from Elegant Themes, my personal favourite source for “premium” themes (i.e. themes that cost something instead of being for free). For a mere $39 Elegant Themes offer a year-long subscription to all of their stunning templates. I hardly tweaked the theme at all – it was pretty much “out of the box”!

I hope you’ll agree – it’s a vast improvement.