The timeline of a website design

Designing websites can be very challenging if your client do really care about the work you do. Some clients will not understand what is good or bad for their business and they will agree if we tell them “This is the best design you will get” or “This is a special type of design – you won’t understand”. But then there are some clients who think a lot, who care about their business and who really want their website to enhance their business.

Twin Job of the Third Place was of this type, and I had to rework many times on the design of the website. At first he did not have any clear ideas about how the website should look like. I had the freedom to do it any way I wished. So here is what I showed him first:

He liked it, but was not completely satisfied with design. He told me that he wanted the color of admiration to be used more in the design. So I changed the color of the header, introduced some gradient effect to it, made some changes to the menu, and presented him this:

Twin was happy that the design reflected the interior design of his cafe. At this point he provided me with a large document containing the data for the website. Apparently, he worked a lot to provided me the data for every page in the website. But this posed some serious problems for the work:

As you can see, the homepage (and other pages too) was filled with lot of textual data and it looked pretty crowded. Twin also did not like mouse-over images at the top. He also complained that I was using too much admiration, and the color of the header must be changed to white or something. He also did not like the dark background for the page (outside the content). But he also thought that dark colors could be used to match the interior of the cafe. At that point I did not want anymore reworks and so I presented him with some more options:

(1) Continue with the current design.

(2) Change the theme to a light one, something like:

(3) Or to a dark one like:

These were not actual designs, but just some ideas I gave Twin to find out what he likes. He liked the new white one, and we continued the work with that. I presented him two more variants of the lighter version:

and

Twin selected the first variant. He also agreed that too much text would not do any good, and so himself produced a smaller data document for the website.

After that I started to tweak the final design. Many changes were made. We got a new photographs for the homepage, and after some days I showed him the products page which contained a flash animation. He suggested using a flash animation for the homepage too. So I started working on that. I showed him a couple of animations, and after getting his feedback, made the final version.

Now, the final homepage looks like: (The big picture is in a flash animation)

This is just the story of the homepage. Each page was designed in this manner, getting feedbacks from the client on each stage. The website also contains forums (bbPress) for the community members and some other pages like the “flavorobilia” pages. I will not elaborate on the details of the coding process. It is another story; and a much worse story. Dealing with your computer is difficult than dealing with your client. You know computers will work exactly as they are told, but you will never know why they still don’t work.

It was challenging to work with Twin, but it was more fun. Thank you Twin, and I wish you all the best with the Third Place.

You can visit the Third Place website at http://www.third3place.com/

You can also join the Third Place forums at http://www.third3place.com/forums/

Visit the website and give me your feedbacks.