Case Study 1
Case Study 1: RabbiGailNalven.com Website Redesign
Modernizing a Business Website
Beautiful pages, updates and new photo galleries
When we first started working on Rabbi Gail's website, we could tell the last designer had not worked on it for over a year because there had been no recent updates to the plugins or themes.
This was especially noticeable by looking at Divi, a WordPress theme that comes with its own builder. The 2.0 builder is vastly different than the 3.0 builder and all of the pages had been built in 2.0.
This is normally not a problem, but the actual design was not flattering or cohesive, giving the impression of incongruity throughout the site.
The site images were also pretty rough...
Despite being huge files, the image quality was low on many of them.
New Header, Contact Form and Photo Galleries
Adding sophisticated details and attractive photos improves the value of the site and the impression upon visitors
New Header and Navigation
The first thing we talked about was the look and feel in a general way, as related to fonts and colors, and what Gail did not like in her current design.
She wondered if the colors she had selected in her old design were appropriate and attractive to the site, but she emphasized that she likes purple as a branding color and we agreed that it does represent spirituality well, so we decided to keep the purple and mute the colors.
She liked her fonts from the old design and wanted to keep those.
When we created the new header, we used black as a placeholder did not expect to keep the black, but once we brought the whole site together, it looked both powerful and tasteful, especially with the secondary menu of deep purple.
New Contact Form
We are not sure why the previous designer left the contact form a dreary grayish purple, but we made sure that we modernized, uplifted and cleaned up the contact page and added a contact form to the home page.
First we changed the background for the contact page from the grayish purple to white which looks cleaner and more cheerful.
Then we created a pretty parallax image background for the contact form on her homepage.
New Photo Galleries and Photo Albums
Even with a modern builder like Divi, creating attractive photo galleries and photo albums takes some knowledge of layout and nuance.
Every builder has its own spacing and overlay techniques which can change the look of the presentation.
Eventually we decided on keeping the pages a clean and white, with a simple icon graphic and purple overlay that appear when the mouse is over an image (called "rollover") indicating that clicking an image would allow the visitor to view a larger image in a lightbox popup.
