“The workshop format was extremely informative and the laid back setting was perfectly comfortable. Not only did we launch a terrific site, but I walked away from the experience with a great working knowledge of WordPress, which will save our small company so much time and money in the long run. Thank you so much!”

- Gaea Ray
Trendsource Distribution

Here’s what Susan had to say about her experience with the 8-hour Website Workshop:

“Trillamar Webcraft was the ideal solution for me. I had put together a rudimentary website on my own, but I put off creating a more polished version because I assumed that a proper website was cost prohibitive and overmatched for my needs as a freelance writer. However, working with Lucinda Brown and her team at Trillamar Webcraft proved invaluable. While I knew what I wanted to accomplish with a website, I needed guidance with design, integrating social media, and general marketing practices. The Trillamar team and I followed my preferred design and text specifications and the functions the website would fulfill, but I was still skeptical that eight hours would be sufficient to prepare me to manage my own website. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that eight focused hours, led by the skillful and organized Lucinda Brown, was ample time to cover all of the bases and then some. I was not the most tech savvy customer, but I found that I could rely on Trillamar to accelerate my understanding of daily website maintenance in a way that I would enjoy and remember. I still refer to the custom videos on website maintenance and find them very useful. After finishing our workshop, I left feeling like I had received tremendous value, not only in a beautiful finished product but in the knowledge I acquired in working with Trillamar. I was thrilled with what we had accomplished in one day, and I continue to receive compliments on the website.”

Susan Sheu, MPH
Currently at work on “The Rag and Bone Man”
susansheu.com

The key to this new model is finding great premium WordPress themes that can be made-over to suit the needs of our clients. Check out some of our favorite colorful WordPress themes, below.

1. Narcilicious by colorlabsproject

We like the bold green in this theme, and it could be changed to any sunny color by changing a few lines of css. Also, the script font makes the site both approachable and elegant.

2. Akono by Voosh Themes

Not a bad little theme. The circles are colorful, though not the most SEO-friendly. The multi-project slider is a neat way to showcase past work.

3. MyBiz by Pliable Press

Ok, the name of the theme is a little uninspired, but this colorful gem of a theme uses image transparency to make the color seem less clunky and blocky and more spectacular. We’d pay the extra $75 for the photoshop files, as we’d love to modify the background images. Bravo, Pliable Press!

4. Outstand by NattyWP

Again, no awards for theme name, but this theme’s full width slider on the home is the perfect vehicle for infusing color and personality into a website. I would waste no time licensing some charming and/or stunning stock illustrations and photography from my favorites istockphoto.com or photodune.com. The site uses cufon which is a little outdated, (hut-hum, it takes a pot to call a kettle black, trillamar.com). I’d prefer to use an embedded font such as google web font if I’m deploying a new website. This is 2012, after all.

5. DynamiX theme by DynamiX via themeforest.com

Ahh, themeforest and all the web meta-products you can buy through envato.com. How I love thee. This premium WordPress theme has so many “skins” it blows my mind. Faves are Bokeh and Orange.

6. efolio theme by imediapixel via themeforest.com

Another feature-rich theme with splashes of color from themeforest. With judicious use of pattern for the background (perhaps using this photoshop pattern maker!) and a single colorful top and/or bottom background image, you could have a stunning color-rich site.

]]> http://www.trillamar.com/webcraft/premium-videos/mfam-updating-google-doc-form-contents/feed/ 0 http://www.trillamar.com/all-projects/project-type/web-projects/hill-dale/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=hill-dale http://www.trillamar.com/all-projects/project-type/web-projects/hill-dale/#comments Wed, 23 Nov 2011 23:47:24 +0000 Ashley Gebhart http://www.trillamar.com/?p=2227 Hill & Dale Family Learning Center is a Santa Monica day care and preschool. They received Trillamar’s first Gift of Webcraft award.

Hill & Dale Family Learning Center has been helping children, families, and educators grow for over fifty years. They offer parenting classes, called My Family and Me, to teach their philosophy of secure, empathetic, and nurturing relationships within a community as well as with the individual.

We teamed with Suzie Roth Design to build a website for their My Family and Me classes. Suzie Roth Design performed the site design, and Trillamar built out the content and generated a library of how to videos so that the Hill and Dale staff could maintain the website themselves.

Congratulations Hill and Dale My Family and Me! We hope the gift of Webcraft will help you serve many more families.

We built a website for Dr. Nina Shapiro that showcased her brand new book, her media appearances, her extensive and impressive CV, as well as her frequent tweetsand blog posts. We also designed some print products — a flyer and a postcard– to support her book launch.

]]> http://www.trillamar.com/webcraft/premium-videos/mfam-seo-settings/feed/ 0 http://www.trillamar.com/webcraft/premium-videos/mfam-updating-home-page/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=mfam-updating-home-page http://www.trillamar.com/webcraft/premium-videos/mfam-updating-home-page/#comments Fri, 18 Nov 2011 23:12:30 +0000 Ashley Gebhart http://www.trillamar.com/?p=2164

In late 2011, Charlotte Brody rolled out a ready-to-wear line, Charlotte Brody Cabana, and some of the custom features we built for this project included:

1. an ecommerce platform with GPS-based sales tax calculation and integration to Quickbooks,
2. custom image viewers for both the ready-to-wear and made-to-order clothing lines, and
3. support for location-specific email groups to support trunk show publicity.

We love clients who come to a project with a clear sense of their own style, and Emily is definitely that.   Our web design process was super-collaborative and efficient thanks to live photoshopping sessions over gotomeeting.

The end result was a web publishing platform that perfectly matches Emily’s style (simple, charmingly imperfect) and style of work (she gets LOTS of things done).  There were a number of innovations we created just for Well-Cooked Life:

1. a custom image viewer with thumbs below or to the side,
2. rss-to-email campaigns for each type of post (household objects, recipes, books and pantry) so that subscribers can get notifications of only what they want via email,
3. ecommerce with inventory tracking, live shipping rates, etc., and
4. thumbnail-based jQuery navigation to put all the gorgeous photos of her Well-Cooked Life on display.

We built this website with AJGpr in a truly collaborative effort. We used a premium WordPress theme and gotomeeting to customize the site, live, from start to finish. The result is a polished, SEO-friendly and social media-friendly site that took less than two weeks to build.

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