Portfolio Website: hazelrichmond.co.uk

As freelance projects go I thought building a website for my Mother would be fairly easy, with most decisions easily signed off because my Mother is less likely to disagree with my choices than a normal client. Although this is true it puts a weight on your shoulders to ensure you make the correct decisions to start with. These days I’m confident of my design skills so knew I could design something beautiful but I also had to make sure it suited its target audience and subject matter.

When looking at sites that ranked for Book Keeping many were directory sites or corporate looking sites with heavy use of straight lines and white backgrounds as you’d expect for that industry. However with a much reduced amount of content than these sites I needed to take a different approach.

With print media already designed I took the visual cues for the website from these. With use of browns and creams as the primary colours I decided that a creating a rather textured site with small content area would be good as it would provide visual interest to a site void of a lot of content. This then gives the content focus and body rather than appearing like a couple of long lines in an ocean of white space.

When first designing the website there was a strict deadline to ensure that there was something available on distributing some offline advertising, to ensure the site would not be rushed a stripped back design was created and a holding page built using this design. This then allowed more time to ensure that the final design was the right one as well as write the content for the site, which was still yet to be done. Once all these were done the site was developed and put live in early February.

With the website now live I will leave it to be re-indexed by Google and then look into what elements of the website can be optimised above those already put in place through the development of the website. The bulk of traffic the website should receive would be through referrals from offline media and with the infancy of the domain Search Engine Optimisation is not a primary goal, however it provides an opportunity to test some things but with a non-existent budget and a site as small as this there are few techniques that apply.

I hope that any prospective customers visiting the website are able to get the information they require and that the professionalism of the design conveys the professionalism of the services provided.