Sharon contacted me for help with converting her Dreamweaver website to something that would better meet her needs. She’d learned a lot about HTML and Dreamweaver over the years, but updating the site was still a tedious process. At trade shows featuring her work, she couldn’t direct customers to explore her site on their phones because the site wasn’t mobile responsive.
In a redesign, Sharon had three major goals:
the website should be mobile responsive
it should be easy for her to make changes and additions on her own
and the design should stay exactly the same
I love working with people who know exactly what they want, so I knew Sharon’s case was ideal for me. The challenge would be fulfilling both her first two goals and her hope of keeping her design intact.
The Process
I started by discussing Sharon’s needs with her. What were the problems with her current website? What was it doing well? What did her competitors websites have that hers was missing? We quickly realized that her site’s design was serving its purpose, but the slow process of updating wasn’t working for her and the lack of mobile responsiveness wasn’t working for her clients.
I began building Sharon’s design into a flexible theme framework, balancing responsiveness with fidelity to her design. I managed to recreate Sharon’s exact design in WordPress, with the addition of some new animations. I tested the site extensively to make sure it would look great on any screen size. Then, I added in an easy-to-use page builder that would allow Sharon to have complete control over page layout and add new content after our work together was done.
When design and development was complete, Sharon and I met in person twice for training sessions. Since then, she’s been managing the site completely on her own.
