After a lot of hard work by Nexco (who handled the data porting from the old site), Shaun Betchuk, and myself, the new Windstone Editions site is up and running. We still have a few quirks to iron out, but it’s looking good. The site was built with the Drupal content management system, which is a great fit for Windstone.

If you haven’t seen Windstone products before, I recommend checking them out. (Don’t be afraid of the dragons.) The attention to detail and the beautiful painting of these sculptures makes them truly unique.

…and good things are sure to follow.

If there’s one thing I’ve noticed that clients tend to overlook when planning a website (and there is) it’s content development. Proprietors of new businesses are especially vulnerable to this pitfall because a new venture’s identity is often still rapidly evolving as its owner sits down with a web designer. Everyone knows that if you want to start a business, getting a website built should be near the top of your to-do list. But while the “build it now, flesh it out later” approach can work, there’s a lot to be gained by considering what you want your site to be about before deciding what it will look like and how it will be structured.

For many people, writing pages of text about themselves and/or their organizations can be agonizing. But here’s the up side: when you sit down with pen and paper (or iPad) and start answering the hard questions, your vision will likely become clearer. How do I want to present myself? What is unique about my company? What do I have to offer that’s different from my competitors? This is all information that should be contained in your site; and by taking the time to really think it through you’ll end up with a more focused vision of what your enterprise is all about. And that can have enormous benefits for both you and your website.

I’ve been so busy building websites for other people lately that my own site had fallen well out of date. So I set to work updating this site’s theme (quadrant) so that it can take advantage of WordPress 3′s handy custom menus feature (among other things). This time around I built the theme on the Thematic theme framework, which is an excellent place to start when designing a custom theme.

I’ve built several sites in Drupal lately. It’s a great platform for larger or more complex sites, and Ubercart (an ecommerce module that works within Drupal) is excellent. But for this site, and for most sites that are smaller or more straightforward, I still prefer WordPress. It’s ease of use—and the huge number of useful plugins that are available for it—make it very hard to beat as either a blogging platform or a CMS for small and medium-sized websites.

In the Portfolio section of this site you’ll find information about several of my recent projects. I’m particularly excited about the World’s Children site. The couple who run this relatively small charity are friends of mine, and they are wonderful people. The next time you have the urge to give back, consider helping David and Jean provide food and shelter for the world’s neediest children.

The soon-to-be-launched Windstone Editions site is the largest, most complex site I’ve created to date. Windstone’s old site was really several sites cobbled together. They had an online store, a large forum, user photo galleries, a blog, and assorted other pages, each one built on a different framework. The store, forum, and blog each required a separate login. Now a single login grants users access to the entire Windstone site, courtesy of Drupal and Ubercart.

So have a look around, and let me know what you think.