Michelle, a Licensed Marriage Family Therapist, wanted a simple, clean, and professional site that exuded warmth and trust.

Not being a techie, she also needed the ability to easily add and categorize articles to her site from her laptop, and she wanted to be able to store drafts of longer articles on the server, without publishing them "live" until after they'd been edited.

For the look-and-feel of her website, we started with one of the free, standard templates that ships with Expression Engine (i.e. the world's best affordable content management solution), and then customized it exstensively to make room for large pictures, and a less cluttered appearance than the default.

On the coding and development side of things, we created a sophisticated navigation system which dynamically adjusts to new content added to the system, and which can be configured according to current marketing campaign goals. This was all "behind the scenes" work, invisible to visitors to her site, but from an administrative standpoint, the flexibility Michelle has to make changes to her site structure is truly staggering.

After launch and deployment, Michelle also had us manage a Google AdWords campaign for her which targets potential clients based on her specialties of couples, teen, and adolescent counseling, as well geographic area. In the first week after launch, she signed up three new clients to her practice, paying for her new web presence many times over in added revenue.

To promote and build a platform around a novel-in-progress: THE VEINGEL, Book One of the Nephilim Trilogy. (Note: The title and url have likely changed by the time you read this)

This site is fairly comprehensive example of how even unpublished, aspiring authors can start growing an audience of committed fans, receiving unbiased feedback on their work, and leveraging all of it to help find an agent and to show publishers they're a step ahead in their marketing when the times comes to publish their first book.

The specific features of this site are too numerous to cover in the space alotted here, but highlights include:

• serialized audio content which can be played on site or subscribed to through iTunes and other RSS readers,
• a topic based, totally dynamic "index style" navigation menu in the sidebar,
• audio promos (be sure to listen to an example below under the audio and video heading),
• comment / listener feedback forms after every entry,
• social bookmarking and networking links automatically posted after each chapter,
• tell-a-friend links which pre-fill an email with the synopsis of the book,

Marla needed a website themed in a way that would appeal to her audience of agents and writers, and that was drop-dead, cut-and-paste simple to update.

Marla Miller is the epitomy of indie creative. She's a fulltime editor for Location3 Magazine, a published author, and a popular speaker at writing conferences where she teaches aspiring authors how to craft a winning book proposal, wow agents with compelling query letters, and craft a killer "elevator-pitch" to hook prospective readers.

Still a work in progress, I'm building Marketing The Muse .Com with Expression Engine, a content management system that allows Marla to paste in articles she's written in Microsoft Word, directly into the "Publish" tab in a control panel she can access anywhere she's connected to the net.