My Portfolio - Mark Forrester

Aperture – Theme concept

Fresh after the release of my latest wordpress business theme – Productum, I’m already busy pushing pixels around Photoshop designing my next theme, a photoblogging theme that I’ll most likely call Aperture.

Please note: This theme is now available for purchase on WooThemes.com.

The Aperture home page — The Aperture Home Page

I’m a keen photographer (all the images I’ve used in this theme design mock up are my own) and I realise a lot of our WooThemes users are too, I’ve thus created a theme that hopefully caters for a group of users that WooThemes currently doesn’t have much too offer.

Aperture will let your photography do the talking in a clean, usable interface. Posts will most likely be called Albums, as that’s what they are to a photographer. Agree? Disagree?

A featured scroller on the home page will display your “x” number of featured albums, as specified in your theme option’s panel. Below that will be a gallery of your photo categories. Each category will display an image from the latest album in that category, keeping the home page dynamic and fresh.

Productum

Productum is a business theme designed for WooThemes to help market your products or services. A custom home page making good use of prime real estate and a nifty image switcher that stylishly advertises your latest offerings, bundled with a feature rich theme options panel means you should be able to brand this theme to your liking with no hassle.

Please note: This theme is now available for purchase on WooThemes.com.

Evita Bezuidenhout’s Zoopy Page

One of the more fun projects I have completed in the past couple months was a Zoopy profile page for South Africa’s much loved comedian Evita Bezuidenhout.

Zoopy is South Africa’s first and foremost video and photo sharing social network. I’ve always been a fan of their neat and usable design so when Jason, at Zoopy’s headquarters, asked me to take on one of their projects I jumped at the opportunity.

Evita requested her Zoopy profile page portray her Afrikaans heritage all the while beaming her support for the new South Africa and it’s bright future. Another way to put it: Boere Baroque – a fashionable but old school Tannie.

The end result was a collage of Evita’s memorabilia – including her photos, a string of pearls, a kruger rand and even her passport, sitting pretty on a pink wallpaper, with dashes of Biggie Best Kitsch throughout the content layout.

Make sure you visit Evita’s Zoopy profile page to view some of her great comedy skits, sexy photos, blog posts and even a sneak peak at her new perfume – Jeau Mour.

A website launch with a difference

One of the reasons, amongst the many, I have been so quiet the last few weeks has been one of the projects I have been working on for Hillsong London.

Hillsong is the church I belong to in London. It’s services take place at the world reknown Dominion Theatre in Tottenham Court Road, Central London. The Dominion Theatre is also home to the show “We Will Rock You”. Going to a Hillsong service is like going to a theatre show every week, 2000 people packing out each service, 3 services a day, awesome live music, international guest speakers, flashing lights, smoke machines and a gigantic cinema screen. Of course at the heart of it, it’s much more than the glitz and glamour though.

SA Rocks

For SA Rocks I was requested to rebrand their online presence and capture the spirit of what SA Rocks is about.

What was involved was heavily customizing the Gazette Premium News WordPress Theme, coding additional modules to the design, splashing the template with bright South African colours, and testing the theme in numerous web browsers.

The end result is a happy, colourful branded website that will hopefully improve the user’s experience on this wonderful website that is proudly promoting South Africa and all of it’s wacky characteristics.

“After reading the incredibly upsetting anti-SA blogs from expats around the world I decided to make a stand. This blog is that stand. I am standing up for all the good in SA. For all the great things that SA citizens do and for all the people who love this country. I love this country and I believe in it and the success that is soon to come.” Source: SA Rocks About Page

The final logo that Nic and me agreed upon has a strong resemblance to the Superman logo. It portrays a powerful, striking image that portrays a message of hope for South Africa. It hopefully portrays Nic’s stand to fight for his country and spread the good news 🙂

The site template uses every facet of WordPress’s extended functionality and allows it to function more as a magazine/newspaper site than your typical journal entry blog.

Fairy Godmother Website Design

“Fairy Godmother Inc. is a company that is committed to helping individuals, companies and organisations get clear, inspired and focused on their vision, dreams and goals and we then support them in turning those dreams and goals into reality.”

Fairy Godmother Inc is run by the fabulous Donna McCallum who is quickly building quite a name for herself and “sprinkling fair dust” on the TV, in magazines, on websites and even at the Opening of Parliament.

The Fairy Godmother website resides on a wordpress content management system and has a completely customized template that makes use of custom fields and various plugins. The website design hopefully portrays a magical, colourful image, all the while attracting both individuals and businesses to attend her workshops and inspiring talks.

WordPress Premium News Theme – The Gazette Edition

Over the past couple weeks I have been busy collaborating with Adii on his Premium News Themes for WordPress. Today we finally launched my wordpress design – PNT – The Gazette Edition.

[box]Since writing this blog post Premium News Theme has been re-branded as WooThemes and I am now a proud owner of the company along with Adii and Magnus Jepson.[/box]

This wordpress template is feature rich with a mootools slideshow displaying featured articles professionally and attractively, lots of advertising banner spaces with complete control over what is displayed from within the wordpress backend panel, a clever little video player that can be positioned on the home page, and different colour options & home page layout structures for the theme at the click of a button.

Enshrine Holdings

Enshrine equips business entrepreneurs with skills, resources and leadership to engineer and sustain South Africa’s infrastructure development plans.

The design is a 3 column, widget enabled wordpress template, based on the popular Neoclassical search-engine optimized code. The template includes numerous custom designed header images that alternate upon page load.

The Big Change

A couple months ago I was introduced to the South African journalist, media analyst and commentator on Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Arthur Goldstuck by Ramon Thomas. I was asked if I would like to get involved with the branding of Arthur Goldstuck’s new blog, The Big Change.

The Big Change has been around since 2001 in the form of an e-newsletter. The e-newsletter focuses on business strategy and technology and is authored by numerous well qualified business executives. It has a considerable amount of subscribers and the aim is to now use the wordpress blogging platform to further enhance the readership and subscriber interaction.

So Close

I was recently asked by Tertia Albertyn to re-design her Typepad weblog.Tertia’s blog, So Close, was this year’s winner of the South African Blog Awards. Her blog focuses on life after infertility and has a huge amount of readers, it has even featured in a lot of South African press. It was therefore not a hard decision to take up the responsibility of the job. Tertia was a great client to deal with and gave me very few guidelines to follow, I could therefore play around with what ever creative ideas I had. It had to have an African feel though, and include her lovely children in some way.

This was my first Typepad theme design and I must say it was much easier than I thought it might be. Typepad is a very powerful system, and with a professional license it allows for heavy customization of the stylesheet files giving you complete control of the blog layout.

I hope you like the end result.