CHRISTOPHER T. NICHOLS | FRONT-END + VISUAL DESIGN
PROJECT OVERVIEW
This is a small dental office that wanted to modernize its website and branding. I flew solo as the designer and developer on this project. I worked with the office to create an updated brand as well as the look and feel for the new site. By request of the client, there were a few specific old pieces we kept in the new design, such as the photo of the client's father's painting and the icon of the office building.
REBUILDING FROM GROUND UP
I built this website from scratch because the old site was built with Dreamweaver back in the 1980's so the code was messy and out-dated. Building it from scratch not only gave me the creative freedom to design a completely different layout and flow, but also the control over code organization and easy maintenance. I created a few extra illustrated assets, all new photography, and a fun and bright color scheme to reflect the office's culture.
Tools Used
Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP
Links
THE NEW DESIGN
During my initial meeting with the client, Dr. Nichols, to discuss what he had envisioned for the new design, an absolute requirement was to keep an image of his father's painting on the home page. I wanted to redo the image of this painting because the existing one on the old site felt out of date to me. I wanted a more modern take to stay consistent with their new branding.
Coincidentally, when I took this photo of the painting in the office, the light happened to catch just right above the bridge creating an illusion of the sun peaking out from behind the fog. In order to make it stand out, I placed a color cutout of the painting on top of the black and white version of the original photo.
Lessons Learned
The client wanted to migrate the entire site to a new host server. Ultimately, I ran into some unexpected set backs on the design and implementation of this site. After completing the build of the entire site, I discovered that the new host server company failed to mention that only HTML and CSS file formats were supported; I had written the code in PHP file format for certain reasons. I had to go back, take out the PHP features, redirect the local JS based interactive features to point to an online source, and re-arrange code to fit the pure HMTL and CSS formatting. Since this is the first time I encountered a host server which only supports HTML and CSS, I did not think to ask. So, lesson learned - next time, ask before building.