PROJECT DETAILS: Client work. Renee's initial website ran into an issue and her former server deleted her files. Her entire website was deleted, losing all of the work we had done together. She contacted me, distressed and disappointed, and I leapt into action to plan a new website design while transferring her domain to my server for hosting. After a week her domain was back online and a "coming soon" page was up and ready for her audience while her new website was in developement.
CHALLENGES & SOLUTIONS:The hardest challenge was figuring out what had happened with the original website and taking a deep breath knowing that all of work we had done previously was gone. I knew I could either be sad about it, or I could take this as a fresh start and a new opportunity to design something new for Renee. I decided to focus on something better for her website as a whole and move forward from there. I sent her a list of things I wanted to highlight on her new website, along with a way to avoid losing her entire website again in the future. After a few discussions, we were ready to rebuild from the ground up.
Renee was known as a blogger within her community, so my main objective was to transform her website into one which focused on her writing. This time around she didn't want too much of her art on her website, but I was able to convince her to keep a few pieces (her favorite work and her newest pieces) online as a tribute to her skills as an artist. We added a few new things, like a more structured timeline for her cancer diagnosis, a larger acordian for her FAQ section and a tip jar. I also found that teaching Renee how to use her new website was much easier with this new format.
SKILLS/PROGRAMS USED: This website was created using WordPress and Chic Pro as the theme. I added a child CSS style to adjust some of the internal pages. This website focuses on more type and less images, so it loads quite quickly overall. I also set up some plugins that would help with saving the website files and created a backup to avoid having to redo everything from scratch for a third time. I created her new logo and branding and more on this can be found here. I also set up a mailing list/newsletter for her using MailChimp and a tip jar using Ko-Fi.
