A simple blog redesign and re-launch at a new domain for Irish telecoms superstar Pat Phelan at PatPhelan.net. (I’m allowed to call him a superstar because not only is he one, he’s one of my favourite clients. Ever.) This site features a customised WordPress template and header. Clean, simple, and nicely grided with a prioritised sidebar.

A campaign website to help Irish women leverage their tax euros and their votes to demand better access to breast health care. The site features quick online activities (online petition, downloadable campaign letters and postcards for purchase) to lobby politicians, and received extensive media coverage.

This was one of those projects where you’re just so excited to get the contract, because hey, it’s Deepak Chopra! And then the client says “You know that 30 day development window we talked about? Is there any way we can get a redesign in four?”

Luckily I already had a complete home page mocked-up, so DeepakChopra.com got a whole new blog in double-quick time. This site was something of a style departure for me, what with there being not a hint of blue and no trace of a Verdana font, but it’s been a lot of fun and I have to say - the people involved in this project have been a delight to work with. Given the short turn around, there will no doubt be changes, and there are plans to add more new toys over the next month, but I’m pleased it arrived on time and all in one piece.

Recently I did a map based on the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama for online study site eNotes.com. Drafting the setting for To Kill A Mockingbird was a lot of fun, satisfying in the same way building houses for The Sims is - everything all tidy and neat and mathematically perfect.

Obviously, I can’t show the whole 800×1700 map or that would defeat the purpose of their website, but I think it came out nicely. They were certainly very happy with it, which is always rewarding.

SwitchNow.ie is a site designed for a new utility brokerage company, using a logo developed by their print designer. The site was designed to match their stationary, business cards, etc. It uses WordPress on the back end, so the client can update the site’s content easily.

In the chronological order of my design portfolio, there’s something of a gap. In November of 2005 I more or less stopped designing web sites for two years to design instead in the virtual world of Second Life.

I’ve created furniture, houses, mansions and full island builds. And designed fabulous parties and events, sometimes for celebrity clients. Much of my time was taken up by blogging Second Life fashion for Linden Lifestyles (see below), which garners a lot of press. I did pop out now and then to do the occasional Second Life website, however, so my web skills didn’t fall out of my brain. I then became quite ill and went on SL hiatus.

A daily fashion blog covering the virtual world of Second Life couture and shopping, which I write with a blogging partner. The site serves over half a million pages per month, which makes it the 2nd most popular blog in Ireland every now and then, despite neither me nor it being particularly Irish.

For almost 10 years, I worked as the Director of Online services for an internet company in London. I must have turned out, oh about a bazillion government, NGO and QANGO websites in that gig - so many that I really can’t remember them all. This is one of my favourites, though - PYL.

There is actually quite a lot of cool Drupal stuff going on in the back end, but actually, the reason I like it is because I think the headers are pretty. They are also magic headers; they cycle through a selection at random, so you get a new one every few times you refresh the home page.

It’s challenging to design a site that looks acceptable when the client hands you a logo that is, to be frank, a dog. But bad logos need good websites, too, and this one was designed in 2005 - I think it holds up quite well.

This was one of my first freelance sites, I think, back in 2005. It was a re-design of an existing site, as in rip it all out and start over from scratch with a new design, new shopping cart and the addition of a WordPress blog.

The site is now maintained by someone else, who appears to have very strange ideas indeed about what attracts search engines. I’m pretty sure the site used to have a background image, too; no idea where that’s gone off to. But being a website designer is a bit like being a parent - all you can do is give a website a good start in life, hand it over to its owner, and hope the world is kind to it through the years.