Site Description: Living abroad, it’s relatively easy to lose track of finances and long-term goals. In addition to typical financial planning issues like preparing for retirement, expats must also deal with issues such as multiple currencies and tax jurisdictions. Based in Shanghai, China, Noto Financial Planning is committed to helping cross-border individuals and families proactively plan for the future and eliminate financial anxiety. Radically different from most financial advisors, NFP offers comprehensive fee-only advice, and does not accept commissions or referral fees..

Project Profile: Having already established Noto Financial Planning as Shanghai’s premium fee-only financial planning firm focused on expats, Tony was looking to boost his online presence as well as develop a more professional looking site that better reflected his business’ offline identity. Additionally, it was important that the site be easily edited and added to, particularly so NFP’s useful collection of articles on financial planning could be easily fostered into a more and more powerful resource. To help accomplish this, we once again turned to the Drupal content management system, featuring a completely custom, hand-crafted design.

Visit www.NotoFP.com

Site Description: The Home Business PRO is an Internet Marketing Consulting Company that specializes in working “One-on-One” with home business professionals who want to leverage new technology like the Internet to attract customers from all over the world to their business, raise their conversions and boost their overall online marketing presence to increase their bottom line using online marketing strategies

Project Profile: Aaron Chen, the network marketing guru behind The Home Business PRO, had previously called upon Dao By Design to construct for him his blog. When the need arose for another site, Aaron again looked to Dao By Design to help him realize his Web site needs. More than just a blog site, for The Home Business PRO site we utilized the powerful Drupal CMS.

Visit www.TheHomeBusinessPro.com

Site Description: Leadership Academy Shanghai guides clients as they develop the knowledge, skills and character needed to gain admittance to, succeed in, and graduate from top American Universities. They seek to prepare their students for the competitive world by providing a Liberal Arts Based, College-Preparatory supplementary education for junior high and high school students in China.

Project Profile: Leadership Academy Shanghai approached Dao By Design to create them a professional and academic-themed site that conveyed their core business and values of training tomorrows leaders. They also required a system that they could manage themselves without a dedicated IT department. To meet these goals we developed a completely custom theme powered by the flexible and easy-to-use WordPress content management system.

Visit www.LAShanghai.org

Site Description: Thrive profiles the lives of 34 women from 18 countries who have come to Shanghai and redefined success for themselves. This collection of memoirs accompanied by beautiful black and white photography, tells the stories of everyday women who chose to not only survive the challenges of this fast-paced city, but to thrive in it. THRIVE is the flagship publication from Grace Publishing & Communications Group.

Project Profile: THRIVE was designed to be a child-site to Publishing & Communications Group’s primary Web site. And while “child” in position, the scope of the project was just as ambitious as any stand-alone site. Requirements for the site included a customized ordering system, special buyer-only login areas, the handling of reader-submitted reviews and more.

Visit www.PublishedByGrace.com/THRIVE

Site Description: Grace Publishing & Communications Group creates and distributes authentic cross-cultural digital and print publications that encourage the sharing of cultures, beliefs, traditions and experiences. They seek to provide readers with broader perspectives, more informed world views and the knowledge and connectedness necessary to build a better future and make a positive impact on the world.

Project Profile: Grace Publishing & Communications Group contacted Dao By Design to assist them in creating a Web presence for their new publishing business. The project required both the front-end Grace Publishing site, as well as a sub-site for their flagship book — THRIVE. While the setup required was rather complicated, it was important that from a management point-of-view, the site remain easy to be edited and added to. To achieve this we turned to the powerful Drupal content management system.

Visit www.PublishedByGrace.com

Site Description: Born and raised in Beijing, Wu Fei is a virtuoso composer, vocalist and guzheng (Chinese zither) performer. She spent her formative years at the China Conservatory of Music before coming to the US in 2000. She holds a M.A. in Composition from Mills College and is a grant recipient of “Meet the Composer”. While at Mills, she began to diversify her sound and experiment widely, working with musicians like John Zorn, Fred Frith, Carla Kilhstedt, Béla Fleck, Pauline Oliveros, and Cecil Taylor. Wu Fei has performed in cities around the world, including Beijing, Berlin, Rome, Venice, Milano, Dublin, Oslo, Rotterdam, New York and San Francisco.

Project Profile: Wu Fei’s long-standing plain HTML-based site needed an upgrade to a more powerful and easy to manage CMS-based system so the busy artist could keep it updated quickly and efficiently no matter where she happened to be in the world. A fully original theme, overlayed on top of the powerful WordPress framework was employed to achieve the goals of the redesign. Additionally, a more fluid and artistic design was created to reflect Wu Fei’s style, giving her a site she could use to inform fans, media and promoters alike.

Visit www.wufeimusic.com

Site Description: The EDGE Creative Collective (ECC) is an exclusive and elite group of leading-edge Chinese creatives curated by the NeochaEDGE team. ECC members are drawn from creative fields including graphic design, illustration, photography, urban / street art, animation, film-making, fashion / product / toy design and more.

Project Profile: The Edge Creative Collective is a sub-site built into the main NeochaEDGE site. The directory-style site needed to be easy to manage, integrate fluidly with their current site’s WordPress backend, expand nicely as more Chinese artists were added to the Collective, and allow for some sexy displaying of the ECC creatives’ art.

Visit EDGE.Neocha.com/Edge-Creative-Collective

Site Description: A joint-venture between Qing Yi Garments and Kinakontakten, Qing Yi Garments Co. produces high quality t-shirts and undergarments using a complete production facility with its own fabric production, sewing and printing departments.

Project Profile: Kinakontakten again tapped Dao By Design to help them build the Web site for a new leg of their multi-faceted business. The requirements were simple — provide a flexible, clean and expandable design built on the powerful Joomla CMS framework. Due to the different arms of the company, two sites were constructed with small accent changes to differentiate them slightly.

Visit www.QingYi-Group.com

Site Description: eXpo is a ten-track compilation showcasing the leading independent electronic artists in China. Presented by The Shanghai Restoration Project (a US based group renowned for its fusion of Chinese instrumentation with hip-hop and electronica) and Neocha (leading online community of independent Chinese musicians and artists), it intends to introduce the world to the leading independent electronic artists in China, who to date have been difficult to identify due to language barriers and an underdeveloped music market.

Project Profile: We love working with the extremely creative minds at Neocha EDGE, and so when they approached us to help them put our function to their form with a new project of theirs, we jumped at the chance. The project required the development of a WordPress-based theme built from their pre-designed layout, along with adding functionality for streaming music, an image gallery and more.

Visit www.expoartists.com

Site Description: John Pasden is a Shanghai-based linguist and founder of AllSet Learning, as well as well-known host of ChinesePod, a site dedicated to helping in the mastery of the Chinese language. His blog, Sinosplice, is a seminal English-language China blog. Established in 2002, it has helped countless newcomers to China with its excellent “on the ground” information about living in the country and learning the language.

Project Profile: John approached Dao By Design to freshen up his blog’s design and streamlining the organization of its massive archive of information. An avid and long-time WordPress user himself, John wanted to bring several segmented installs of the blogging platform, which were powering his various blogs, into one cohesive install for easier management and future flexibility.

Visit www.Sinosplice.com