I am proud to announce the launch of my latest site, this time for Vanessa Gerhards. Vanessa is a dance instructor and a culinary artist, she wanted a website that clearly reflected those two aspects. I think her new website is a great representation of her two tremendous talents.

When I began brain storming ideas for her site I wanted to keep her message incredibly simple.  After a brief visit to her site, I want the viewer to immediately know who she is and what she does. The best way to do this is with one image and one word. These two items send a stronger message than a whole page of text ever could.

Vanessa looks stunning in her bright pink dress and gives a sense of movement and grace with her dance pose. She also looks great in her traditional German outfit in the next slide. I used a simple jQuery plugin for the slide effect. This allowed me to place all the attention on one item at a time.  Each image is clickable and leads to more information about Vanessa’s highlighted talent.  I used a shadow effect below the image to to create a little depth against the background. This worked perfectly with the photos that were taken outside in the sun.

The bottom of the home page displays her twitter posts, dance schedule link, Nessi’s Kitchen episodes link and her latest blog posts. I thought the blue of the two icons in the middle nicely compliment the pink of her dress and logo above.

Just like Will Kelsay’s site, I built every page with custom fields that allow Vanessa to update her site without having to know any code while at the same time keeping the flow of a good design built with valid XHTML.

After completing the site and taking a step back, I think I accomplished my goals of creating a simple, easy to use site that sends a clear and concise message. What do you think?  What do you like or dislike about the site? What would you have done differently?

Take a look at Vanessa’s new site.