Designing a local business's website from Scratch in 6 days
I had the opportunity to take over a website build when someone contacted me after they had a bad experience with a freelance web designer from Fivrr.
After taking a look at what the other freelancer had done and where they had left things incomplete, I decided I could handle this project.
Despite never having used Shopify before ( I wasn't a fan of its website builder), I learned it in a matter of days and got the entire project shipped in less than a week.
Website Contents
Hero banner (the part of the website you see upon first entering)
Hero banner design choices:
H1: Header.
You need this to call attention to what your business is. Normally this would be your main value proposition, ie. what unique solution you are providing to your customers.
In this project, my client wanted to use a phrase she came up with: "your genie in the kitchen." Although this does not describe this business, it does provide the site visiter with a sense of authority and quality.
H2: Subheader.
Usually, this supports the value proposition brought forth in the first header. Here, we used another phrase my client came up with: a touch of melted magic. Again, although this does not describe the business, it only had to convey a sense of quality and assure the customer that they could trust this business.
Clients coming to this website already knew the product provider, in this case the woman who made the butter. All they had left to do was buy the product
CTA button:
This is the call to action button, ie. the action that you want to site visitor to take. In this case, the obvious solution was that the customer came to the site to buy butter. So, they needed a central "BUY NOW" button.
Product carousel
Product carousel design choices
Font: fancy serif italic
I wanted to use a plan sans serif font (like the one you are reading right now), but she wanted to continue the fancy aesthetic of her kitchen. So, we went with Shopify's default fancy serif font.
Images and cards
The obvious next part of the home page needed to be a display of what my client was selling. So, we put all her products out front horizontally.
Lesson for next time —> try to convince client to not use serif font for small descriptions. You can't even read the descriptor text below each product's phot.
Business inside scoop
Design choices
Most of this section used leftover design artifacts from the freelancer that she broke up with. My job was simply to lay it all out in a way that worked with Shopify's site builder and didn't take up too much space on the home page.
Next time —> I would lay them in a 2x2 square, rather than 4 horizontal.
Other Site Elements
About us page
Contact us
Newsletter sign up
Design choice:
"Join the buttercup patch" instead of default "sign up"