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A website is born!

Every website represents a person or a company, and there's always a story. This website is the story of Heather Rose. Heather lived in South Florida, where she has received a business degree, and had worked as a human resources manager in several capacities before moving with her family to Western Massachusetts. In becoming acquainted with her new environment, several things happened. First, she realized the value of her knowledge and experience for companies that could benefit from it on a freelance or consulting basis; and second, the beauty of the countryside of Western Massachusetts released the photographer side of her nature, which previously had been an irregular hobby of hers.

Heather began pondering the need for a website as she was receiving increasing requests for copies of her photos. She had already established a presence for her human resources resume on LinkedIn, a business social network. The immediate impetus for the website was when she was getting ready to produce a postcard with a collage of her photographs. She asked several people for their feedback on the card design, and I said - well, if you are contemplating a website, you should go for it now, so you can put the address on the postcards!

That did it. She selected the name heatherdrose.com because heatherrose.com was not available. I recommended that she go for a ".com" if she could. I helped her select a domain hosting site, and within about fifteen minutes, she had purchased her domain name and hosting. Then I could go to work. Since the purpose of the site is to showcase her and her work, selecting the site to be her name makes the most sense. The stages that you see below show the journey that Heather and I are taking together to develop a site she can use.

But before getting into the particulars, let me mention one decision that does need to be made up front. I could have simply posted the "Under Construction" sign, and then developed everything behind the scenes, posting at the very end. In this case, it made sense to have a developing work as the public front: this way, certain components are functional from the beginning, and people otherwise are warned that everything isn't done.

 

I could have just put up the hardhat, but that's boring.  The motif was easy: with a last name of Rose, the use of the rose flower was obvious. So as a beginning step, I took a picture we had from our rose bush, and set it up with Heather's contact information. I picked the colors not through consultation, but by getting colors that picked up colors in the photo.
This one, you should probably check out in full by clicking on the image to the right. This was my first interaction with Heather about the specifics of the site, apart from a general discussion about her goals for the site, and that fact that she wanted both of her businesses listed. Here, I duplicated the info on the original "under construction" version to let her choose two things: font, and whether she liked a single flower, or a border better.
Heather selected Comic Sans as her preferred font. The decision about font is an important one, and it has ramifications. In some "build your own" web-site systems, you are offered literally thousands of fonts. The problem is: what you get isn't searchable on a web engine. If your system is text-based, as it should be if you really want visitors to be able to find you, then it's important to pick a font that is standard to Windows. Otherwise, the non-possessor of the font will get Times New Roman or Courier, and all your attention to design goes out the window. Then I asked her about colors. She said she wanted blue letters and earth tones. So I created this next version so that she could see her preferred font with an approximation of what she wanted colorwise - fonts look different in different colors.  
Confronted with my color suggestion, Heather wanted something darker - both for the main font color, and the background. So I gave her a color wheel to pick from. This is precisely the font color she chose. The background color is lighter than she chose, but in the same color group. This was where I modified her choice a bit for a pragmatic reason: I know that "older" eyes have difficulty readings sites with a dark background and dark letters. Contrast is key. The other change at this point is not so obvious unless you click on the site to view it in full: I added a second page, the home page for her human resources consulting service. I did that at this stage because, first, it was important to get her the functionality of being able to tell a prospective client where they could go on the web to download her resume - and secondly, to begin to examine the stylistic differences for this page, because her consulting company name is Sapphire, while the obvious name motif is rose. Here, on this initial Sapphire home page, you begin to see the conflict represented by these two visual motifs. This is something we will have to bridge before the site is finished. 
Heather went to work. After some discussion about the components needed for a web site, she worked out a preliminary logo and masthead after she had a chance to look at the iconographic possibilities of roses and sapphires. She began to map out the content she wanted in the site, and the kind of navigation that would work. In this first rendition of this more complete structure, I created her home page using her preferred masthead, background and color. I decided to show Heather this page before I started working out the sub-pages.
After checking with Heather that the overall look was fine, I started to set up the subpages that Heather had designed. I began to create the navigation system. So far, I have simply set up a series of hyperlinks in a table. While the site is still not done, the portion that is will serve to get into the queue for bot searching and search engine optimizing. 

 

Ok! To this point, my clock has registered about 3 hours. It could have been a lot more. Heather has been through web site revisions in her prior work environments, so she already has a certain sophistication in knowing what to expect - and what she needs. She has also been completely willing to "do her homework." Web design at its best should be a collaboration between web designer and client. The web designer brings skills and knowledge about what will or could work - but the client is the whole focus of the show. A web designer doesn't know the business like the client does. So how can the web designer represent the client without a lot of feedback?

So keep following our adventures as Heather's site grows!

 

 

PO Box 19185 • Asheville NC 28805 • (828) 713-0535