Services

Website Design & Email Marketing

I have over 10 years of experience designing and building attractive, accesible websites for clients all over the world. I use Wordpress and ExpressionEngine for all of my projects and write semantic, standard-compliant code. Have a look at my portfolio or contact me.

I also offer clients email marketing—newsletter design and coding along with a powerful tool called ContactManager which allows management and indepth reporting for each campaign. Contact me to learn more about ContactManager.

The Typical Design Process Depending on the size, type and budget of a project, these are the steps I usually go through.

1

Discovery and Exploration

Discovery and exploration involves working with the client to understand their industry and competitors and how they do business. We will also discuss the issues that face the current website and what the ideal new website will be like.

The deliverable for this phase is the Creative Brief—a short description of the project which will contain a high level description of how the new website should function, objectives, audience and assumptions.

2

Information Architecture and Content Preparation

At this stage we decide how best to intuitively and logically categorize and display the content of the site to the user. The output of this process is the information architecture diagram, or simply the site map, which shows a breakdown of the pages and subpages that will exist in the site. Along with deciding on how to structure the site, we must also decide on the content that will populate those pages.

The second part of this stage therefore involves creating all of the content. It is understood that the content prepared at this stage may change and be refined before the project comes to a close, and this is easily accommodated. What is important is that we understand the function of each page on the site and the message that they will convey.

3

Wireframing

This stage involves creating very basic compositions of the pages of the website. Its main purpose is to test different layout options and visual hierarchy in a way that can be rapidly changed or refined, without having to worry about all the details that exist in a full-fledged design.

It is done in grayscale so as to avoid distractions, such as colour or other “noise”, and to test the contrast of different sections. Jason Santa Maria's seminal article Grey Box Methodology presents a detailed guide of this process and interesting discussion.

4

Design Comps

Taking the wireframes from the previous phase, design comps are created in Photoshop. These design comps now add colour, images and actual copy.

It represents the way the website will look when viewed in the browser. Changes can also be made at this stage as they are sometimes more easily implemented here than after the coding process has begun.

5

HTML and CSS Coding

At this stage flat, static pages for each of the templates identified are created based on the design comps completed in the previous step. They are built according to web standards using clean and semantic markup. It should be understood that the website will not look exactly the same in every browser as some browsers support technologies that others don't.

However, it is guaranteed that the website will have full functionality in current versions of all major browsers including those made by Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera. The static pages generated at this stage are tested for HTML validation and are ensured to be fully functional.

6

Content Management Integration

We then take the static pages and integrate them with the content management system (CMS) that will be used to power the website, creating an actual website. We test again to ensure that the website is working as it should be in different browsers, and that no code errors were made in the transfer.

If it is a very large website, then I will create a few of the pages and show you how to do the others yourself.