Another site built on Wordpress as a back-end, the Cole-Raine site features brochure pages as well as a fully featured property finder database and article library. The site was built to a design specification supplied and went live in a little under a month from first contact.

The property finder was developed using Wordpress’ existing category structure, a very cost effective solution.

I’ve just set the new site for the Birmingham Conservation Trust live. I’ve advised on how it could work, and done the final coding and design.

The Trust is a charity that tasks itself “‘to preserve and enhance Birmingham’s threatened architectural heritage. … to promote an enjoyment and understanding of the city’s historic buildings’”. Most famously they restored Birmingham’s Back to Backs (now a National Trust attraction).

The site itself has been in the planning for a long time, but was held up when the Trust decided to go through a change of image. I’m pleased that the new look works much better on the web than the previous style.

The move to a WordPress based CMS and blog should help with keeping the content fresh — often a problem for charity sites (where everyone always had many calls on their time). That should in turn help the engagement of users with the site, and hopefully contribute to the efforts (physical and fund-raising) of the Trust.

Gavin Wray designed this elegant website for management consultancy Ladder Consulting, which I then turned into a Wordpress theme. The site contains a blog, as well as a number of hierarchical pages which are all controlled by Wordpress’ easy-to use CMS.

The site looks great in all browsers and is very accessible to all.

I working on a site (which I can’t reveal yet, it might not even see the light of day) that is basically a fake social-network, populated by characters that don’t exist. The main point of it will be the feeling and story generated by the characters and thier interactions, but it’s important to get the look and feel right.

I’m using Wordpress and a theme called “facebooked” by Justin Tadlock, it’s very well done but is only intended to give a blog an appearance of Facebook (which I’ve tweaked to be FB-ish, but not exactly the same). So I’m adding stuff in, by judicious use of plug-ins, page templates and custom fields. I’ve managed to generate workable status updates, friendships, groups and events as well as profile pages — but what else does a social network need?

I threw out the question on twitter and Anthony Herron suggested adverts, which is good. Not only would you normally see them, but it will help to fill gaps.

But I’m open to suggestions — not for what you’d like to see in a social network, but for what you wouldn’t believe one could work without.

I developed and promoted a Facebook application in support of the Black County Urban Park bid for the People’s Lottery funding. The application was simple, but showed support in the user’s profile an provided direct voting links. I also produced a myspace or blog badge that did the same for other websites.

Podnosh.com - a podcasting service - is a site that I designed and developed. The original brief was for a site that allowed uses to build their own podcast channels from the programmes published - they would do that by building a keyword, author or tag search. This was implemented but is still to be unleashed onto the site - a very useful feature if it ever is.

Later a Wordpress blog installation was added and integrated into the site design, and development continues to support the expanding services that Nick Booth has to offer.

upyerBrum.com is a social news site, that allows users to vote on stories and links collected from across the internet. The front page shows popular stories as well as content tagged “upyerbrum” across the web for users to vote upon. It interrogates Flickr, YouTube, Technorati and del.icio.us APIs to do so - pulling out relevant titles and descriptions of each item of content as well as thumbnails for the photographs and video.

For upyerBrum I have developed a Facebook Application that places top stories in people’s profiles - this is a quite tricky area due to some quite restrictive cache issues in the Facebook API, but I’m pleased to say it works well.

Birmingham: It’s Not Shit has been serving up the not-so-ugly truth about Britain’s second city since the time of its failed European Capital of Culture bid in 2003. It continues to attract visitors and publicity, and has become one of the foremost online presences in the area - offering news and comment to as wide an audience as it can. It maintains a community element with groups on Flickr, commenting on the blog, and a long-running forum. The latest version is built on Wordpress and BBPress.