I designed the first website for Financial Education Professionals in 2003, when it was a two-person operation run from a home office.

Nowadays, FEP has an office just off Circular Quay in Sydney, with a permanent staff of seven and a team of part-time financial trainers working throughout Australia and South East Asia. And a new website.

As you can imagine, it continues to be a privilege to have a client for long enough to work through several site redesigns – and I’ve written about that before, here and here – but it’s also gratifying to think that my work on the FEP web presence has contributed to their success and ongoing expansion.

For the latest site redesign, I stayed with WordPress as the content management system but took the opportunity to work with a theme called Absolum, which I have previously admired but never used.

I’d recommend Absolum to anyone who wants a robust, flexible theme that will withstand a fair bit of customisation and still look great in all modern browsers. It uses the plain  HTML doctype with divs, and provides a facility to add custom styling – although I still found myself editing style.css directly, and the php files, for that matter.

As well as the usual Akismet, WordPress Automatic Upgrade and WordPress FireWall (version 2) plug-ins, I installed Contact Form 7 as it powers the Contact Form 7 Widget option to easily customise and place a contact form in a sidebar, and NewsTicker Aink for a scrolling display of training courses, again allowing an adequate amount of easy styling.

I used Typekit to display Pragmatica font for the site title.

For the record, I’m not bothered that Internet Explorer won’t display the text-shadow used on the site title and elsewhere. It limits but doesn’t spoil the intended visual effect and, importantly, it doesn’t undermine actionable information bering provided or affect the functionality of the site in general.

Elisabeth is an essayist and reviewer who has just published her first novel, Those Who Come After.

The book is based on and extrapolated from Elisabeth’s own experiences, which she previously covered in an essay that won the inaugural Calibre Prize in 2007.

It might sound like overkill – writing a novel based on your own essay about your own upbringing – but Elisabeth’s is quite a story.

The following extract is from another essay of hers, Missing from my own life, published in 2008.

My full name is Elisabeth Miriam Esther de Rijke-Nassau. I am a medieval dinosaur. When I die, a DNA coiling back to Charlemagne will be declared extinct. In 2010 others who claim a more indirect descent from Charlemagne will gather in a place called Vianden, in Luxemburg, to celebrate one thousand years of identity as the Nassaus. Vianden, a castle in the air, was abandoned in the seventeenth century but reconstructed in the 1960s. It is where my ancestors first established their identities as warlords, dukes and princes. Now it is a tourist site.

The Nassaus led the revolt of the Low Countries against the Spanish in a war that lasted the worst part of eighty years, ending in 1588. A century later, another Nassau, William of Oranje-Nassau, became king of England. At the Battle of the Boyne he defeated his father-in-law, James II, the last Catholic king of the English. Among William’s legacies was a divided Ireland and the wearing of the Orange in support of the Protestant cause.

I was born on a freezing day in January 1947 in a place called Middelburg, on the island of Walcheren, the most south-western province of the Netherlands. Middelburg, or Middelbroch as it was known in the Middle Ages, was founded in the twelfth century by Elisabeth Kunigunda, daughter of the king of Thuringia and wife of Wolfert of Nassau. My grandfather, who had many titles but preferred to be known as ‘The Lord of the Islands’, registered my birth the same day. As if he knew I would be the dynasty’s full stop, he added to my birth certificate the title ‘The Lady of the Islands’. The matter of titles is a minefield of arcane conundrums. Only someone born into the family can be known as the Lord of the Islands. As I come from an unbroken male line, there had never been a ‘Lady’ before.

A few days after my birth, I was decked out in eighteenth century lace in preparation for my baptism. The tradition of the Calvinist sect I was born into dictates that one of the godparents should carry the child to church. My godfather, Prince Bernhard, the German-born son-in-law of Queen Wilhelmina – a war hero like my father, who was his close friend – emerged from my grandparents’ house, took one look at the snow and ice in the street and removed his army greatcoat. I was carried to my baptism wrapped in the same coat that Prince Bernhard had worn when he accepted the German surrender at Wageningen.

This should tell you two things: Elisabeth has quite a story to tell, and the telling of it plays a large part in her life.

I suppose this is all the more pertinent for me, because I’m Dutch-born myself. It certainly never occurred to me that when I sang the words of the Dutch national anthem as a child that I would later build a website for a descendant of the king mentioned in the song’s opening lyric.

As an immigrant, there is a further level of interest for me in Elisabeth’s story, in that it is very different to my own. My working class parents emigrated to Australia with the specific aim of providing greater educational, social and career opportunities than might have been available in The Netherlands. The Holdsworth family had very different reasons for emigrating and lived in very different circumstances.

The website itself is not a complex one, but that didn’t make it any easier to create. I think quite a few designers are like me and find sites with lots of content rather easier to build than those that only have a few pages. On a small site, every page seems to carry greater value.

In this case, I have probably ended up placing more emphasis on style, look and feel than I might normally. And there is also a kind of freedom in that.

By the way, the castle in the background of each page is the one Elisabeth refers to in the excerpt above. The presence of this edifice is intended to serve as a visual metaphor for the looming sense of historical imperative that pervades Elisabeth’s writing.

One way I have of showing this is to provide pro bono web services to deserving clients.

I consider myself fortunate that this can range from websites for local community groups with which I’m involved, like scouts, soccer and nippers, through to a couple of websites for Helen Caldicott, probably the world’s foremost anti-nuclear campaigner and an Australian, to boot.

I had been planning to migrate Dr Caldicott’s site from a static site to WordPress in a fairly leisurely fashion when it suddenly became important to get this done pronto.

What happened was, of course, events in Japan where natural disasters had highly deleterious effect on the Fukushima nuclear power stations. Naturally, this made many people want to re-examine the words of those who have warned of such dangers for many years. Dr Caldicott was instantly in high demand for comment and analysis and people flocked to her website for background information and news updates.

When I say “flocked”, I mean traffic went from 25 visitors a day to 1,000, where it still hovers. Fortunately, the hosting account I have with Crucial Paradigm was able to handle this with ease but it did mean that I had to fast-track the site upgrade.

As a result I didn’t re-design the site very much at all, just moved it to WordPress and set up a few things to take advantage of what plugins can do for a site.

There’s a fair bit of work to do yet, but I think everything’s working pretty well.

This means, of course, I will have to weave some similar magic for Dr Caldicott’s other website I host, People for a Nuclear-Free Australia.

At least it’s for a good cause.

Most of the time, it’s a straightforward task to work out what the person wants from their website.

Often, it involves digging into the client’s background, achievements, skills, plans and aspirations in order to properly understand them and their product or service and frame a web presence that will do them justice.

Sometimes, as I have just recently found out, that process can take me a year. Step forward, Professor Iain McCalman.

To say Iain is an over-achiever is an understatement.

Just to give you an idea, his CV runs to 16 pages, including 14 books he has authored, co-authored, edited or co-edited; 46 articles in books or refereed journals (which includes publications such as the Australian Dictionary of Biography, English Historical Review, American Guide to Historical Sources and Dictionary of Literary Biography), another 16 articles in non-refereed journals and the like (New York Times, The Australian, Cosmos, History Magazine, etc); 51 papers delivered at international conferences and seminars; 34 public lectures delivered at symposiums and festivals; 10 international conferences he co-convened; the four international workshops for professionals he has conducted; and the 17 occasions on which has acted as consultant to international art and msueum exhibitions and documentary films and television series.

Then there are the 34 occasions of professional service on councils, boards and committees, 19 of university service and eight of government service.

He is currently Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Sydney and Adjunct Professor at ANU. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and has held Visiting Research Fellowships in Britain and the US, including at All Souls, Oxford and as a Mellon Visiting Professor at Californian University of Technology, Pasadena.

He is, of course, a teacher – supervising an average of four PhD students a year plus a number of Masters and Honours students, and was awarded the Inaugural Vice Chancellor’s Prize for Teaching Excellence at the Australian National University in 1994. He was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2007 for services to history and the humanities.

Iain’s is by no means a dry, academic renown.

His book Darwin’s Armada: Four Voyages and the Battle for the Theory of Evolution (2009) was published in separate editions by Penguin in Australia, Simon and Schuster in the UK and WW Norton in the US. It was favourably reviewed by, among others, the New Yorker, The New York Times, Kirkus Review, The Times Higher Education Supplement, the Guardian, and the Australian Literary Review.

It also attracted glowing reviews from major Darwinist scholars such as Janet Browne (Harvard), Harriet Ritvo (Harvard) and Stephen Rose (University of London). An international conference in its honour, Darwin Across the Disciplines was held at Duke University in November 2009. The book was shortlisted for seven Australian literary awards, including the Age Book of the Year and the Walkley Award for Non-Fiction, and won the Western Australian Premier’s Book Prize for Non-Fiction.

It was the basis of exhibitions at the National Maritime Museum of Australia and at the Macleay Museum, a Film Australia website and a three-part TV series, Darwin’s Brave New World, shown in Australia, Canada, Germany, France and the United Kingdom.

Iain’s literary agent decided it was high time he had a website of his own, and sent Iain to me.

I admit I was daunted – by the task, not the man, I should add: Iain is a highly personable and engaging chap, very easy to spend time with – and I admit I dithered and dallied with a range of high falutin’  ideas, before coming back (eventually) to a relatively simple structure that just aimed to make his extraordinary career thus far navigable to the web visitor, and offered scope to include whatever the next chapters of his life may hold.

There is still much work to do in including all the possible content and interlinking it to accommodate as many paths of interest to the visitor as possible, but I am mightily relieved that I have at last been able to launch the site, and that my client is delighted with it.

Phew!

This includes putting together a site for a little commercial venture for a product called SkiClip. It’s a clever little product designed to hold skis together as they’re being carried around: simple but effective, which naturally became the keynotes for the website.

I’ve given it an HTML doctype, but I can’t really call it an HTML5 site in that it doesn’t use the new semantic elements when it could have. That may still happen – in fact as I write this I’m feeling myself pretty well obliged to.

I don’t want to make this a New Year’s resolution or anything (a surefire recipe for failure, as far as I’m concerned), but I would like to be more consistent in my approach to coding this year.

We’ll see, eh?

ACSSO is a long term client and one that I value because the subject matter matters.

Having not so long converted the site to WordPress (admittedly in a clumsy albeit functional manner), it was good to be able to expand what should be an important interface between the peak national body for public school parent organisations and anyone with an interest in public education in Australia.

In the past few years, ACSSO has consolidated its role as a provider of information-as-advocacy to public education stakeholders. Much of this has been focused on web technology and information aggregation, and has developed some very solid information products.

These products – by which I mean mainly websites and email newsletters (produced by me) – have in turn created a direct dialogue with stakeholders that we’re seeking to expand through the website.

So far, it seems to be working well.

Sci-Tek Systems sells, installs, tests and services medical refrigerators.

These are the kind of fridges and freezers used by hospitals, pharmacies and pathology centres to store blood, vaccines and the like. They’re based in Wollongong and service pretty much all of NSW and ACT.

As always, I spent a bit of time understanding the business, scoping my client’s competitors, Googling for likely search terms and generally surveying the medical and pharmaceutical refrigeration market. As you do.

Even though it’s usually my client’s responsibility to provide the content, as it was in this case, I do the research because I’m the one who’s going to be presenting it, so I’d better understand it.

I’m also scared to hell that I’ll get stuff wrong. But then I’m also always pleasantly surprised by how interesting any line of business is. It all works out OK.

In this case, my client had some specific aims based on his own market research and that very much informed the basic structure.

I should say re-structure, as there was already a website in operation.

Apart from being a bit dated in its looks, and failing to cope with modern wide screens, the main issue with the old site was that it buried the items the client wanted to emphasise: the products themselves.

I was a little surprised, then, that my client opted to remove the prominent photo of a big three door blood fridge I had set on the home page and replace it with his phone number. He has a logic to it, which he explained, and he’s the boss.

As my client’s web hosting account didn’t include MySQL, among other things, this would be a static site. So I decided to make my first HTML5 site.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it play nice on Internet Explorer 8 – which is, of course, the browser used by my client. It’s possible – likely, even – that there are solutions to the problems I had with HTML5, but I didn’t have quite enough time to follow through.

But I will say that it felt very close. I think my first HTML5 site is not far away.

Not only does he know more about personal communication skills than anyone else I know, he has a singluar ability to draw the best out of people.

He brings to his consultancy AB Communicates a rare combination of a highly technical understanding of how people communicate and a gift for analysing and improving corporate management.

I don’t know whether he had those characteristics before he started a 25 year climb from regional on-air broadcaster to General Manager Local Radio for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, running a national network of 58 radio stations, or whether he has built up that skill set over time.

It makes perfect sense to put communication skills and corporate management skills together like that – I just don’t see many other people who have so successfully mastered both. And manage to remain a fundamentally good bloke.

Having managed Andrew’s consultancy website for a few years, I’ve now been allowed to give it a complete overhaul.

That gave me the chance to again review just what Andrew does, how he does it and how people can use his talents. Remarkable.

We used WordPress 3.0 as the content management system, adapting the Thesis theme.

FYI, I am very aware of the current argument between Thesis developer Chris Pearson and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg about whether the fact that Pearson charges for use of the theme contravenes the GPL conditions applied to use of the content management system.

Personally, I am sympathetic to both points of view, and I can only hope the resolution of this situation leads to greater clarity in the relationship between free and paid web applications.

We installed the following plug-ins:

Akismet
Fast and Secure Contact Form
Random Text
WordPress Automatic Upgrade
WordPress Firewall

We also installed Google Analytics to track site traffic.

In some lines of work, this might be regarded as a failure of the original work, but the web is developing so fast and in so many different ways that it’s almost a requirement to review any web presence on a regular basis to make sure it’s doing its job properly, and to take advantage of the burgeoning bag of web tricks that keep emerging.

In addition, a client may themselves also change: their basic set of services, who they see as their market, and how they want to portray themselves to that market.

A case in point is Julie McCrossin.

I’ve been managing Julie’s website for four years now and, while it has incrementally reflected changes in her working life, the time came for a complete structural and design overhaul as she enters a new phase of the business of being Julie McCrossin.

We used WordPress 2.9.2 as the content management system, once again adapting the Atahualpa theme.

For particular functionality and layout, we installed the following plug-ins:

Akismet

Clean Archives Reloaded Version 3.1.8

Alkivia SidePosts

Fast and Secure Contact Form

Simple Archive Generator

WordPress Automatic Upgrade4

WordPress Firewall

WP Events Calendar

We also installed Google Analytics to track site traffic.

Among his diverse range of projects is a weekly 30 minute radio show called Living is Easy on Eastside FM in which John explores health and lifestyle issues, with equal regard for alternative and mainstream diagnosis, therapy and medication.

John brings in experts on topics suggested by listeners, and is keen to use a web presence to expand on this kind of interaction: inviting suggestions and requests for topics for discussion on the show, podcasting the show, building the listener base – and seeing where it goes.

We used WordPress 2.9.2 as the content management system, adapting the Atahualpa theme.

For particular functionality and layout, we installed the following plug-ins:

Akismet

Contact Form 7

Podcasting Plugin by TSG

WordPress Category Archive