Clara Raubertas // Freelance Web Design, Web Development, and Web Consulting // Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts clara raubertas design. development. consulting.

What I’ve been working on lately:

• Launched the new site for Templeman Automation. I created a custom design for this product development company and implemented the design with a custom version of WordPress so that Templeman can easily add new product or project pages and display news blurbs and a featured product on the front page. I integrated Google Checkout with the site to give users an easy way to purchase Templeman’s products. I also got to learn sIFR for this project, which was lots of fun to work with — all the headlines in the site are automatically transformed into a custom font.
• Added some new features to the Fly Over The City bike messenger dispatch site — the client wanted a holding area for jobs to be deleted and a label printing function for clients.
• Made some tweaks to Flathound, a real estate search site written in Ruby on Rails; the coolest part of this project was adding an edit-in-place feature for administrators, so a user can just click on a field in a list of apartments and immediately get an edit box without having to go to a separate page.
• Added some new features to Espressy; in addition to listing several countries they identify with, users can now add specific details about their relationships to those countries and share thoughts, memories, and recommendations.

I’ve also been doing some design work and some more Ruby on Rails coding for projects that are yet to be launched — and another interesting project that I’ll post about soon!

Some website projects I’ve been working on in the past couple months:

• Launching the design for MetaArts, an educational publishing development house in Chicago
• Launching MyWomanToday, which I worked on through Webstudio Boston — I did all the backend Ruby coding for this social network
• HTML coding for Really Useful Information
• Some updates and changes to Lamp Glass’s online store
• Wordpress customization for Tall Tales from the Antiques Trail — it’s still under development, but this will be a blog where a local antique dealer collects colorful stories (from his own experience as well as from colleagues) about the business

I’ve also been enhancing my Wordpress skills and learning sIFR for some other projects that are still in the behind-the-scenes stages. One of the great things about being a freelancer is getting to learn new technological skills with almost every project!

This blog — and my main site — have a new look! I’ve been working on this design for what seems like forever (actually it’s a few months, but that’s still quite some time) and I’m very excited to finally launch it — let me know what you think!

This blog is now powered by Wordpress! I switched over from Blogger in part because Wordpress offers more features and extensibility — like that tasty tag cloud over there — and also in part because I keep the free-as-in-beer-and-speech Wordpress code on my own server, where I can read and modify it, or not, to my heart’s content. Ah, delicious freedom!

Plus, Wordpress was not only super-easy to install and set up, but importing all my old Blogger posts and implementing redirects from the Blogger page addresses and feeds to the new versions took just a few minutes. It’s not surprising that Wordpress is considered the best blogging platform out there!

It’s sporting the default Wordpress theme for now, but expect an exciting redesign of both this blog and my portfolio site in the coming weeks!