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The Nest – Flexible Hourly Child Care

admin — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 00:13:03 +0000

I am proud to announce the launch of my latest professional project TheNestKids.com.

The Nest provides flexible hourly childcare in Woodinville WA.

The Nest is owned by two mothers, who are both savvy business women and stay at home parents (or should I say formerly stay at home parents :-D ). I am so proud to know them and to have helped them to create a really nice online presence. I wish them best of luck in their new endeavor.

I also can not wait to become a customer. As a stay at home parent, I know I often struggle to plan appointments or meet a friend for lunch, because I always have the kids (or at least one) with me. I don’t need a regular child care provider, but could definitely use someplace safe and fun to drop off the kids when I have something I need to do that they can’t attend. This flexibility could be just what many of us are looking for.

They will also offer evening care for the occasional dinner out or a movie. Finding a babysitter can be quite a challenge and even if you have a great one they are not always available. This could provide a safe place to drop the kids that turns into a night out for them too. I have heard a couple of whispers about the great activities they are working on and I am really impressed.

Can you tell I am excited about this one?

As far as the site goes, I collaborated with designer Michelle Poole on this one. She created the beautiful banner, images and basic layout and then I worked directly with the business owners to turn it into a cohesive product that we are all extremely pleased with.

Like many of my sites, I used php includes to separate the code from the editable content. This simplifies maintenance and provides an environment that the owners (should they ever decide they want to) could update themselves. I also used php to create unique seo friendly meta data for each page within the site. I used W3C valid css and xhtml to create a strong foundation for the site and the jquery ajax library to add a lightbox popup.

This has been a really fun project to work on. If you live in the area, The Nest will be opening in September. I recommend checking them out.

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KarinReece.com

admin — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 19:07:51 +0000

I am excited to say that I am finally officially “hanging out my shingle” and have launched karinreece.com.

I am available for web design and development services on a freelance basis. Please take a look at the site for all the details.

I have been on quite the journey over the last year and I feel really good that I am finally at a place that I feel I have the time, energy and enthusiasm to take on new clients and start to build my business and reach my goal of contributing to the monthly family budget by the end of the year.

I am excited about the opportunities that lie before me and look forward to helping small business owners take advantage of all that the internet has to offer.

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Marnie Valenta – Seattle Massage Therapist and Birth Doula

admin — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 18:18:22 +0000

I would like to introduce you to marnievalenta.com, my latest project.

Marnie has been my massage therapist for years and acted as our doula for Ada’s birth.

She is a dear friend and I was so happy to be able to give her a professional web presence to promote her business.

If you live in Seattle and are in need of a good massage or compassionate and strong labor support, I recommend you give her a call.

Marnie was interested in being able to edit her website herself, but with such a simple site and being a savvy woman she wasn’t in need of a full content management system, just an easy way to edit the copy on her site.

To accomplish this I used tableless HXTML and CSS for the layout, which removes much of the extranneous code from view, and php to insert the header and footer. This created simple pages of text which are easily editable and separate from the bulk of the sites code, leaving little room for problems to occur. Now marnie can maintain her own site, saving time and money.

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MorningstarSchool.com

admin — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 22:37:24 +0000

I am proud to announce my latest project. Morningstarschool.com

This wonderful little school is my daughter’s preschool and my son will start attending here in the fall as my daughter goes off to Kindergarten. I am proud to be able to contribute to my children’s school by using my skills to help them create a whimsical yet professional website that helps them to grow their business and take away the headaches and expenses of maintaining a website.

This is a custom themed WordPress implementation used as a simple content management system using pages and custom navigation. Although WordPress is usually used as a blog platform, as it is on the redesigned mom, it lent itself nicely to this application.

The director’s goal was to be able to easily update the content on her own site without having to worry about coming in contact with the structure of the site. Wordpress enables her to update the text, images, downloadable documents, photo galleries and school closure information at the touch of a button in a “word-like” environment that she felt comfortable with. I was even able to provide her with quick reference tutorials using draft posts that are available right on her administrator dashboard.

There are many content management systems available and I looked at drupal as well, because it is the other one I am familiar with, but for this simple site there just wasn’t the need for a more complicated and robust system like Drupal. Wordpress in all it’s blogging glory was just what this little static site ordered.