JuliaHart.co.uk Gets a Makeover

Juliahart.co.uk, Our Latest Project, is featured in the StudioPress.com Showcase of sites using the Lifestyle theme

Julia Hart is passionate about skincare and teaching people how to achieve and maintain youthful and healthy skin. After the launch of her online skincare shop last year she started to a basic blog, but it soon became apparent that she needed a better way to showcase her information and advice on skincare, plus a more effective way to drive traffic to her online shop and products.

WordPress was a perfect solution, and the StudioPress Lifestyle theme was an obvious choice to showcase the large amounts of information.

Julia’s first stop was Es-preso websites. There, Sharon and Kerry customized the StudioPress Lifestyle theme, applying the branding from Julia’s shop (which they had designed last year) so that the new StudioPress site would blend both her ‘blog’ and ‘home page’ (the Wordpress site) and her ‘online shop’ (built by secure online shopping specialists SEM Store) seamlessly and harmoniously.

Then it was my turn. Working with Sharon and Kerry, I applied the code changes necessary to get the look and functionality they were after. I took the beautiful images that Sharon had created and the beautiful color scheme and made them design reality.

I customized the code of the Featured Content Gallery plugin so that each image in the gallery would link to a specific page on the main site or directly to Julia’s store, instead of being limited to only linking to “featured” posts. This gave us lots of flexibility and allowed Julia to feature exactly the items she wanted to.

Another clever part of the home page is the “Product Reviews” featured section, where I designed the featured content area to accommodate Julia’s latest featured video on the left with accompanying information and links on the right.  I added full instructions to the code so that Julia would know exactly how to update the video.

We also added a fun rotating “tag cloud” feature to the sidebar.

Julia was such a pleasure to work with, and the gals at Es-preso and I have found that we make a pretty smashing collaborative team.

To top things off, Brian Gardner, the developer of the StudioPress themes, has included the juliahart.co.uk website as part of his showcase of sites! Woo hoo! We’re extremely honored.  Thank you again Brian!

The Julia Hart website truly shows just how versatile the WordPress / StudioPress combination is.  You can see the entire site in action at http://www.juliahart.co.uk. We are all extremely proud of the outcome, and Sharon, Kerry and I have thoroughly enjoyed working together. We are looking forward to many more collaborations!

If you are interested in the Wordpress / StudioPress approach to developing a new or existing website then please contact me for more information. Who knows: Maybe your website will be the next “showcase piece!”