Clients: SkinnyChef™ Culinary Services

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Designer/Developer/Project Manager
Developed during September 2005
Launched: September 2005

Compare SkinnyChef Blog Layouts:
Self-Hosted using WordPress
Hosted at Blogsome
Hosted at Blogspot
Hosted at LiveJournal
Hosted at MSN Spaces

About the Client

Jennifer Iserloh, founder of SkinnyChef™ Culinary Services, is a culinary artist, prolific writer, cook and dedicated food appasionada. Over the last three years, she has been sharing many great stories about friends, culinary professionals, and everyday people who have a real passion for food and life - all on her website at SkinnyChef.com.

Design Overview

After publishing her diary for the first three years in a hard-coded (static) HTML format, Jennifer was finally ready to embrace the enhanced functionality and ease of use that comes with content-management solutions such as WordPress. In July 2005, the SkinnyChef™ Diary was relaunched on Jenn's site, emulating the look of the previously hard-coded layout - for visitors a quite seemless transition.

In most redesigns, clients often come to us with two questions in mind:

   "Will my blog seemlessly integrate with my existing website?"
      "I have a very specific layout in mind. Can it be implemented?"

This case study shows how the original site's layout was seemlessly transferred to both self-hosted as well as hosted packages at Blogsome and Blogspot. In either case, the layout was conserved to provide visitors with a unified brand identity - extending from colors and layout to imagery.

Unlike Blogsome and Blogspot, LiveJournal and MSN Spaces allowed only for limited customization of the generic templates, and it remains to be seen how the blogosphere responds to this fact.

Why Choose Iserloh Design?

Iserloh Design retains expert knowledge in emerging technologies, and provides its clients with exactly what their businesses need. Keeping costs in check is a big concern for many small businesses, so Iserloh Design's developers work predominantly with free and secure open-source software applications that don't cost a dime, are easily configured and benefit from a huge developer-base working tirelessly on new features.

Recent examples of Iserloh Design's work with open-source database-driven websites are in the areas of ecommerce (Julia Tan Jewelry), bulletin boards (Making It In The City) and blogs (Parmarth Girls, SkinnyChef, Uli.Iserloh.Blog).