Overview

This project spanned roughly 2 years, due to juggling team priorities. As an in-house designer, I am very proud of this website and think it really helped to take the business to a different level. They moved from a $50 stock template, to a professionally designed website, down to every detail.

The Challenge

As an in-house designer, I had been wanting to re-do the company website, I I thought it missed the mark of it’s full potential to gain sales and represent the company properly. This problem persisted, but since the website was ‘working,’ I kept hands-off. Personally, I felt that not all elements in the design brought any use to the end-user (such as photos of berries). The website also left me confused as to who the primary audience was, and what was expected of the user to do.

At some point, the marketing director updated the WordPress theme and parts of the website stopped being editable. More and more of the website was be stuck as-is. I did try my best to trouble shoot the third party theme, but I came to the conclusion that due to the coding of the theme it would not be feasible to try to fix it. Since the website was now ‘locked’ and the design needed improvements, some team member decided this was the time to re-design the website.

I did research on competitors websites and presented the team with a list of proposed pages for the website. We agreed to these, so I proceeded to work on design options for the home page. After some revisions to the homepage, I proceeded to develop the website.

Personally, I do not like to design any website with too much ‘filler’ content, as I believe the design should support the content, not the other way around. There were many stops and starts in the content due to the work schedules of the subject matter experts.

Once developed, the team got the designed website to a pretty good place, but there was another pause on the project. After some months passed, the boss himself made this project a priority, so the website was able to get through it’s last stretch of content updates and design changes.

Why I was the Best Choice

Working with this group of stakeholders took a great deal of patience,persistence and diplomacy to get the website done; stake holders had other priorities on their plates and differing visions. No, these are not ‘design’ skills; these are project management skills, but sometimes what makes a good designer ‘good’ are the auxiliary skills that s/he posses.

Additionally, the previous website was done by an outside contractor. This left the design less that satisfying and used some proprietary coding that made updating the store-bought stock theme difficult to automatically update as the WordPress core needed. By using me, an in-house designer, I was able to put the right amount of time to this project. It was also in my self-interest to do the best I can, as this website represented the parent company to which I worked for.

Why I Chose This Project

This was a job as part of my employment, but I chose to embrace it. It hurts me to see a website under-represent it’s company and lack value to the owner. I was eager to give more value to the website. It would have been easier to settle or perpetuate the underlying problems of using generic stock themes, but I wanted to make a website that met my high-quality standards.

Services

Project details

Services

Content Population / Front-End Development / Responsive Design / User Interface / web design / Web Development / Website Design / Website Development / Wireframes / WordPress

Project details