First I have to apologize to the loyal followers for my false advertisement in the last post. Deliverables were lacking last week and a post was not had.
Sorry.
But, that shall not deter us from our quest to complete the adventure of building a quality website. This week we turn the corner from mocking up the site and actually begin coding! Are you as excited as I am? I thought so. Sit back, hang tight and lets review where we’re at so far.
Hang in there, we're entering the home stretch!
As you may recall we’re designing the new site for “3.14 the Pie Place.” There wasn’t a previous site (just a place holder) which gives us more freedom when coming up with designs.
“Designs?” you ask. Yes, “designs.”
We want to come up with a few options for the client to review and perhaps pick and choose design elements that they like and wish to incorporate into the final design. I say a few because when it comes to choices you don’t want to flood the client with too many and coming up with several designs can a huge time commitment. And since 3 is a magic number, well stick with 3.
"3 is a magic number..."
To begin, I went back to the informational documents we collected at the beginning of this adventure to help keep my focus on what mood, message and content is expect from the client. I also used the wire frames from last week to maintain content structure and flow. In addition, I asked the client to review similar websites and provide feedback on what she liked/disliked about them. This feedback was very valuable and helped me get a better idea of what she is expecting.
Feedback I received:
“while this site is kind of busy for my liking i really like the colors. light blue and brown are kind of my thing. it definately is really busy, though. too many pics and stuff moving around.”
“again, this is one of the best sites i’ve found. it’s simple, i love the colors and the lighting and pictures and just about everything about it. i love the way they show you the pies (menu) although it doesn’t work too well when you’re trying to click on one, so i wouldn’t want EXACTLY that, but something similar would be super awesome.”
“this is another good simple one. i like the way they have a whole bunch of items with pictures to click on on the front page. kind of gets to the point quickly. the colors aren’t my thing though.”
“i like the colors and the banner of this one.”
“i really like the layout of this one too, with the pictures of the really popular stuff on the front page. that might be substituted by the ‘quick list’ you have though. i also kind of like the idea of making you view more than one item at at time, you might see something else you like!!!!”
It can be a bit of information overload. The trick is to review the information and when in doubt, use their feedback to make decisions. For instance, I noticed that the client really responded to the large artistic shots on most sites and that she also preferred certain colors over others. This helped me come up with the large banner picture for the homepage and a dark cherry red/brown/cream color palette.
Below is the homepage design that the client chose:
With this step complete I can now focus on coding and styling the actual site. Some features might change depending on implementation and manageability but we hope to limit that to only a few iterations, otherwise the site could get stuck in revision limbo and never make it to the world wide web.
This weekend I’ll be making a trek to the client and taking a plethora of pie pictures for the site. It promises to be delicious…beyond delicious! So stay tuned…
This is a great post, thanks!!