PROJECT DETAILS: Client work. My client, Renee Sendelbach, had a blog that centered around her journey with metastatic breast cancer. She is also a self-taught artist that has created and sold many pieces to help fund her treatments that are "bright & colorful art to infuse your space with the energy of Love, Hope, sparkly energy & fun". She had a great vision for the flow of her website overall, but couldn't dedicate time to make it happen on her own.
CHALLENGES & SOLUTIONS: I quickly found that by researching Renee she had art all over the Internet--from Flickr, to Etsy, to a small gallery on her current blog at BlogSpot, to Pinterest, to Facebook--and I knew that I would need to spend some time collecting, organizing, and ensuring that all of her artwork lived on one website. In skimming through her blog posts I also found that she didn't utilize categories to keep her posts organized. I was ready to dive in deep and get everything sorted for her.
Over 800 blog posts were read through, line-by-line, and categorized individually. An additional 200+ art pieces were collected from every reach of the Internet, organized, categorized, and had a featured image created in order to be ready for her gallery. With these large projects out of the way, I was able to focus on the look and feel of the rest of her website, creating a few slider images as a fun newsfeed at the top of her home page, and creating an easy-to-register mailing list with MailChimp so she could condense her audience into one place. She had a terrific YouTube presence as well, and so I made sure this link was also incorporated throughout her website.
The resulting website is a professional, bright and positive place for all of her work and updates that she shares with her audience. The day the website was completed, Renee actually told me that she had a new event lined up that had asked her to come speak about her experiences. She was thrilled to be able to direct them to her website so they could learn all about her and have a place to link back to throughout their social media posts advertising her upcoming talk.
SKILLS/PROGRAMS USED: This website was created using WordPress and Feminine Style Pro as the theme. I added a child CSS style to adjust some of the internal pages, and created a few updates to the code to make some of the updating easier for my client. This website is very "post and image heavy" so I utilized many different plugins to help ensure quick loading and less compression throughout. Her new logo and branding was created by me and more on this can be found here. I also set up a mailing list/newsletter for her using MailChimp.
