Finished a website officially in time for Christmas. I’ve gotten to know the owner of Consumer Service Analysis enough that I’d call her a friend. She seems to be really taking off with this mystery shopping business which is fantastic. I’ve been thankful that she’s been letting me guide her a little bit with some of her logo and web branding.
This website was kind of a stretch for me. I’ve developed both a love/hate relationship with this one over the course of building it and I’ve admitted to her I think this one is sort of a little bit of a gamble as to how it may be received by her visitors. Could it be too artsy-fartsy for her business corporate clientele? Maaaaybe. Certainly there are quite a few mystery shopping websites out there with nothing more than a very template/corporate look to them…I would say it’s a pretty dull look to a business that I think is actually kind of fun and exciting. Who doesn’t like shopping mixed up with a little espionage?
So when designing for CSA, I gave her some very straight corporate looking proofs and then I had this one thinking, “I like this one but there’s no way she’ll pick it.” What do you know… she ended up liking it. So at least I read my client’s vision right, so we’re both taking the risk on this together. I think it could pay off though…she’s a fun character and this is a kicking business already. A little spicier look to her site may send the right message out there.
I took some risks on this from a development standpoint. Certainly this probably the only website I’ve ever done in the past decade that uses a giant fixed background. I’ve seen this crop up as a trend in the past year and I wanted to try it. And then there’s the whole thing with the transparent panel PNGs. That’s also a risk as some of the older IE browsers don’t render that well. Always the IE…./sigh.
I wanted to try out some of the newer techniques of the rounded corner features of CSS3 and testing out Font-face which will eventually let me use non-web-standard fonts. But I ended up not doing those just in case. I didn’t see enough information out there to make me feel comfortable taking that gamble it’ll work.
Overall I’m pretty pleased with it though. It’s lightweight… probably less than 20 files and clocks in under 3MB for the whole site. Content was given the professional lookover from my SEO friend…
Knock another one down!
LoweStudio Inc was founded by me, Raphael Lowe, a Honolulu based illustrator and web designer. I presently design and manage a few dozen commercial websites, but my main focus these days is acting as the head developer for Kapiolani Community College and teaching