Wim Hendriks, landscape architect by profession contacted me about extending his brand online. He got questions of existing and potential clients on how to reach him online and he’d built a nice portfolio over the years. So a small business website, or a KMO website like we call them in dutch was in order.
Approach for a KMO small business
So we talked, and I got to know his business, the stuff he did, the brand he represented and I showed him my ideas and the possible options. From that meeting I built a design, based on the content, photography provided by himself and text written by a copywriter, based on the things we talked about. I optimized this a bit more to focus on specific areas of expertise, order of elements, SEO etc and a clear call to action. No extra pages too. People like to scroll, certainly with mobile devices, people also like to look at portfolio work, so a nice and easy, swipeable gallery component helps them with that.
This is a starting point, an online existence, enforcing the brand, letting people easily find Wim, inform them on what services he provides and making appointments that hopefully result in more succesful landscaping projects.
Workflow
This project certainly had a content first approach. Making design decisions on the real content instead of on some lorem ipsum. A static page was built as a prototype. Making it easy to test on mobile devices and the responsive behaviour. Typography and color scheme was designed first on a styleguide page with a Bower / Grunt / Sass setup and then applied on the actual content page for further tweaking. A lot of attention went into tweaking the content and defining the sections and their order. After that this was rolled into a WordPress theme template file, an options page was created to assign the different ‘pages’ to sections and to customize the site further, and per page an extra options panel was built in to further refine styling like colors, title size, margins, paddings etc. Basically to have maximal control to tweak section styling later on without having to dig into the stylesheet.
Take a look at the WordPress website for Groenatelier Lommel
