Brandy needed help. Big time. Manager of 3 retail sewing and vacuum repair shops, sewing teacher, and mother of 2 boys, Brandy had no time to learn about websites. She’d bought a domain name, had been paying a monthly hosting fee for over 2 years and still hadn’t put together a website for her family-owned business. Her store flier, which went out quarterly, took too much time and energy to create and too much money to print and mail. And the only way clients could register for classes was to come in to the shop. It was time to call in a professional. So, of course, she called Studio Bold!

I worked with Brandy on developing a plan. We transferred her domain and subdomain to a new hosting provider and set up company email accounts.

I worked with one of my writers to develop the content she needed and created a website that provides general store information as well as a class schedule. I built the website using WordPress so that she can easily update content as needed.

REMINDER: You don’t have to be a blogger to use a CMS like WordPress!

For the design she showed me some fabric that she liked.

I used the fabric on top as my inspiration for the background and color palette.

I chose stock photos that were not only relevant, but also reflected the turquoise, brown and orange palette.

And I used the signage in their store window as inspiration for the header logo.

I added a Paypal shopping cart so that class registrations could now be done online. I also set up an e-marketing account at MailChimp where her client email addresses are all stored and she can use a branded e-mail template to send her quarterly flier, coupons and and store news.

Yay!!!!! It looks great!!! We are so excited to move into the 21st century! Thank you sooo much!! — Brandy from Sandy’s Make It Sew

To request a questionnaire so you can be considered for a future Bold Moms (& Dads) article, please contact me! You can view previous Bold Moms (& Dads) articles here. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to have future Bold Mom articles delivered to your inbox. Thanks for visiting!

I was so excited when Tiffany Romero, founder of The SITS Girls, asked me to work on a logo for her new personal site. She wanted something light and airy. She loved the look of anything vintage but still wanted the logo to be clean and professional. She had a logo for her old blog, R Family Diaries, that used turquoise and black and she thought she’d like to keep that color palette.

Tiffany sent me some images that she’d found on the web that had a similar style to what she was going for.

She decided to have me create 2 concepts for her to choose from, but because of all the love that she and the other SITS Girls have given to me, and because I was having so much fun working in this vintage style, I did 3 concepts. Here they are:

I kept it light by using thin fonts or thick fonts with highlights to represent old-style engraving, and added lots of ornamental details. She’d used a fleur de lis (in French, fleur means flower, and lis means lily) graphic in the past so I wanted to try and incorporate that as well. In addition to the client-requested color palette of turquoise and black, I decided to try a chocolate-brown and an antique-gold instead of black. These felt more in keeping with the vintage style and would prevent the logo from looking too in-your-face.

Tiffany said it was hard to choose but she liked the middle one best. I did, too!

Check out the logo on Tiffany’s new site here!

Sonya is a graphic designer, like me, but she specializes in publication design (books and magazines). She came to me to create a site to house both her portfolio and blog (another part of the project was importing her current blog from Blogger). She didn’t have the web design or programming knowledge to do it herself and was far to busy to take the time to learn. She also has several other personal and professional sites that she wanted to be able to showcase and link to from this main site.

She showed me a few stock themes that she like and we discussed the aspects of them that she’d like to incorporate into her site. She liked the combination of the soft yellow and blue/grays and wanted a very subtle floral background. We decided to keep the feel of the site light and airy so that her portfolio and blog photography wouldn’t be overshadowed. The final site was built using StudioPress’s “Serenity” Theme as a base.

She just wanted a simple text logo which I also incorporated into a blog badge.

Because I hired you, even though I’m a designer so I could have done it myself, it allowed me to have the time to blog EVERY DAY. I would not have been able to build up the blog, as a newbie, without letting go of the design aspect. This freed me up to focus on planning posts and being creative with my content. The result is that I have a nice-looking blog filled with content — which has made a HUGE difference in my confidence as a blogger. — Sonya McCllough, Sonya Mac Designs

Erin contacted me to design a logo and website for her new health coaching business, Health & Wellness Innovations, as well as redesign her existing blog, The Grass Skirt. For her health coaching company, she wanted something clean and modern and was hoping to use the color yellow. I really wanted to use a similar graphic element in both logos to tie them together as a brand. The pineapple was a great solution because I could stylize the graphic to also look like a sun—representing health, warmth and happiness. Also, her blog name, The Grass Skirt, is based off of her signature smoothie recipe which uses pineapple, kale and  banana (among other things). Yep, kale. Don’t knock it til you try it. I’ve started making this green smoothie for my kids and they beg for more!

Here’s what her new health coaching site looks like. I created a background pattern based off of the pineapple in her logo. I also used an embedded font throughout the site that matches the font in her logo. Because yellow type can be tough to read on a white background, I kept the subheads over-sized and then used the aqua from blog’s color palette for smaller hotlinks.

For the blog design, I kept the same structure so that her audience could comfortably go back and forth between the two sites. I also kept the font the same as it is used in both logos. I did a lot of custom work on this design including using post excerpts with thumbnails, cute post headers, and a recipe gallery.

The biggest hurdle on this project was in moving her old blog from WordPress.com to a self-hosted site. The move involved mapping the old wordpress.com domain to the new domain,  importing all the content and notifying her audience to update their bookmarks and subscription information.

About the logos: “I love them both!!!  You did an amazing job!  I honestly cannot think of anything that I’d change.”
About the Health & Wellness Innovations site: “My first reaction when I clicked on the link was, “Wow!!!  I cannot believe this gets to be MINE!”  In other words, I love it.”
About the The Grass Skirt blog: “I DO love it!!!  It seriously looks amazing.  I love how you have a featured photo next to each post!  I am so excited to launch it to my readers! ”  —Erin Turner

I’ve been working with a lot of my clients on enhancing their social media presence.  Here are some examples of Facebook Page landing tabs I’ve designed and programmed (Note: Facebook still refers to it as a tab even though it no longer looks like one). A landing tab is an attractive way to welcome new visitors to your Facebook Fan Page and encourage them to ‘Like’ your Page so you can begin serving them content on their news feeds.

{Click to visit on Facebook}

{Click to visit on Facebook}

{Click to visit on Facebook}

{Click to visit on Facebook}

Back in February I wrote a guest post for SITS on How NOT to Design your blog. In coordination with the SITS post, I had contest for a Blog Mini Makeover on my blog. The winner, and my new friend, was Jean Myles and her blog, Mommy To Two Boys!

Jean’s main concerns for her blog design were that the colors and graphics on her existing blog just weren’t her style. She showed me some examples that she liked of designs that were more clean, modern and graphic. The new design is more representative of her style and the theme of her blog.

The Focal Point

The logo is clean and creative; using the four circle O’s in her blog title to form two little boys. The stacking of all the O’s make the logo seem off-balance, almost teeter-tottering—similarly to how Jean, mother of an autistic child and a toddler, says she feels on an every day basis.

It was important to Jean to continue to have photos of her two boys, Jaylen and Xavier, in her header. The problem was that the boys are quickly growing and changing and she didn’t want to have to pay me to change the pictures out every few months. I coded her header so that the two pictures on either side of the logo are actually separate image gadgets (widgets in WordPress). This way Jean can change out the photos herself as needed and it will remain looking like it’s all part of a single header image.

Simple Patterns

She wanted a geometric pattern and liked the idea of having much of the background be white or a solid color as opposed to having pattern throughout. The circle pattern I created for her only tiles horizontally across the top of the blog. This allowed me to use a more eye-catching pattern without overwhelming the viewer and distracting from the content.

Minimal Accessories

The original design had quite a few sidebar gadgets. One easy way to simplify them was to create little social media icons rather than separate gadgets for each.

I also recreated her badge using the new logo. Her old badge wasn’t a standard size, which made it difficult for some users to place it on their sites. Her new badge is a standard 125 x125 pixels.

Another thing I cleaned up was the navigation menu that was originally made of large images using a non-web font. Using the Pages gadget (similar to Menu in WordPress) I made a text-based menu that not only looks clean but also is better for SEO. And by reducing the height of the header/menu much more of her blog content is above the fold (viewable without scrolling) — which is the most valuable part of a web page.

And I couldn’t help but do a quick favicon to match!

I’m so pleased with how the Blog Mini Makeover turned out and so is Jean. She’s also written a post about her experience so go check it out — she’s so funny!

First off, I love it. Absolutely love it. So professional and clean. Exactly what I wanted. And even the favicon is adorable! The colors, sidebar width, and everything else are perfect. And the number 1 thing Renee!!! I was thinking that I loved those two pictures I just put up on my last blog post and was thinking I would ask you if we could switch them out with the other ones we had up there and you READ MY MIND! That is amazing! My jaw literally dropped when I saw that! Thank you, thank you, thank you! I LOVE it!!!! —Jean of Mommy To Two Boys