Just finished! For the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on a new website for my client, contemporary romance author Sheryl Lister.
She was looking to update her website’s look and overall feel to better reflect her personality and to communicate an air of elegance to visitors. She liked the design I created for my “Save the Date” Wedding theme, so I adapted and re-built it for use on this new website project.
I rebuilt my original wedding website design, which I built from the “Underscores” WordPress starter theme, onto the Genesis Framework. This new theme for Ms. Lister’s website actually began as the Genesis Sample Theme, and I brought into it significant customizations so that it doesn’t look like it did at the beginning. I hope she’ll be happy with it and that her readers find it useful and, most of all, a delightful experience to use. Of course, that is always my ultimate goal in any website I design.
For the sake of comparison I have included a screenshot of the old website that I was charged with redesigning. One thing I liked about my new design is that in my attempt to reduce the number of links visitors would have to navigate, I used the widget areas in the sidebar to allow contact information, such as the link to subscribe to her MailChimp newsletter, the form for users to send a simple email, and links to her social media accounts to be present in the sidebar of every page. That way I was able to eliminate the “Contact” page altogether.
The other thing I found interesting in this project was that I learned how to use categories to make three different “blog” pages. These pages were for (1) books-published posts, (2) regular blog posts, and (3) upcoming events posts. I then made menus based on those categories and have able to pull in dynamic content in three different pages. This was the first time that I’ve done that, and I’m glad I figured that out for the client to be able to use the site in just the way she wanted.
As always I learned a lot and look forward to my next challenge and design project.
Call me!
