November 15th, 2010
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.
August 18th, 2010
I am very pleased to announce the launch of Will Kelsay’s brand new site. Countless hours of research, design and development went into the production of Will’s site. I wanted this site to be the absolute best site in the triathlon industry. I relentlessly researched what other professional triathletes had and made sure that Will’s was several steps ahead.
Will’s new website was designed to be an informational and promotional website for his adventures as a professional 
triathlete. At the same time, it was important to highlight Will’s sponsors that support him and finally tie everything in with social media. I quickly came up with a simple wireframe that was the basis for his site. I wanted to present a lot of information to the user in a way that was clean and easy to navigate. At the same time I wanted to add plenty of eye candy to keep the user interested.
Once I had the ideas for Will’s site outlined, development was ready to begin. Getting the basic structure of the site
written was relatively easy. As the process went along several revisions were made. From the 2009 – 2010 season the TIMEX Multisport team changed their color scheme from orange to red. It was easy enough to change the CSS to a red theme. However, Will’s site would have had a very different look if it was orange.
Will had a very well established and followed blog already running in Blogger. My original thought was to include an iframe and import his blog into the site. However, having his blog fully integrated with the rest of his site made for a much better user experience. As a result, I built his blog right into the site using WordPress as his CMS (Content Management System). It was very easy to import his old content from Blogger to WordPress using the import tool.
Where Will’s site really stands out is the attention to detail used throughout the site. This can be seen in several places,
most notably the transparent background which shows off the mountains in the background but doesn’t detract from the content of the site. Another area is the photo gallery, I constructed a custom photo gallery just for Will’s site that was both beautiful and easy to navigate. Finally, take a look at the custom call to action buttons on the front page and contact forms. These buttons were made in Photoshop to complement the social media icons found on the contact page. All of these details come together to make the site truly unique.
One of the most important features of the site was for Will to be able to update the site easily without having to know how to write any code, but at the same time making sure everything would still look good. Websites that are not hand coded with XHTML and CSS are made with a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. These editors make it easy on the user because they do not have to learn any code and generally have a similar layout to Microsoft Word. Unfortunatley, the results often look like Microsoft Word documents. The way to get around this issue is to format everything with hand coded XHTML and CSS and then include custom fields where the user can insert a picture or a block of text. This ensure that everything will look good in the end.
After feverishly working on this project I am excited to launch and get some feedback. What do you think, did I accomplish my goal of making Will’s site the best in the triathlon industry? What do you like about the site and what would you change? Take a look at Will’s Site and you can be the judge.
