Web Design Portfolio

The birth of a website

During the last couple of years I learned, that designing a website is not always the easiest task.

The most difficult thing is communication. Often times websites are developed for your customer and not for yourself. That comes with a large amount of communication and creativity.

Customers often have no idea how a server, routing, DNS, color concepts, web-design or any other component of your job works. On the other hand, you have no idea on how the business is run, what the website should represent, what the values of the company are and all the other pieces you need to create a website that suits your customers’ needs. Here is where the challenge begins.

You have to really engage with your customer to understand what their idea is and what they are looking for. Most of the time you have to help themselves understand these same things before you can really understand them. This is because customers do not know what is possible and if they do what they want from these million billion options.

You have to guide them through these concepts and ideas to help them figure out what they are looking for. But you also need to feel out your customer and their business, ideas and values. When you think you understood your customer, wait for your presentation of the first prototype and you will see how wrong you really were. I think this skill, of understanding all kinds of customers, is not a skill you can learn from a textbook. You have to learn that through trial and error. Thousands of times. When you think you saw everything… you did not.

It is really not a skill you can perfect. There is always a new challenge up ahead with your next project. It never becomes easier and two website projects will never feel the same.

But trying to understand your customer is just the first step towards a finished website. After the first requirements are set, the fun really begins. You start off by doing an analysis of the current situation. Does the customer own a website already? Where is it hosted? Is the website finished? Do they have a Logo? What colors does it have?

Then you can really start with the basics of setting up a website. Buy/rent a webserver or get the user credentials, update or install the Content Management System (CMS) on the server, setup https/SSL, potentially setup some subdomains and some more minor tweaks to get a good performing webserver.

After setting up the basics its best to have a template build of your CMS ready to go. I usually build a template on my local machine for the corresponding CMS if I did not used it before. A template needs to feature all settings that are not special to the website you are creating, like generic plugins, settings and styles. This template is then imported to the live site.

The first job then is to create a fitting “Under construction” site. This site has to be based on the image you as a web designer has in mind for the final product.

To be continued…

Lawyers Office

My first project in the legal industry was a website for Lawyer Andreas Lorenz (thats not me) from Cologne. He needed a new website, because his old website was a bit out of date style-wise. The goal was to create a new website with a stunning first impression to increase the contact rate. Reason being a new business field for the office in data security.

I tried to create a cool and modern style of website that keeps the authenticity of the original website while implementing web technologies like parallax scrolling, mobile optimization and dynamic tiles allocation.

The website can be found here.

Poster Online Shop

The small ecommerce Start-Up LovelyPrints asked me to create an online shop for them to sell posters targeted to woman at the age of 14 – 25. Therefore, the goal was to create a very feminim look and feel for the website featuring a lot of pink and white.

Overall this online shop had a very sleek look to it featuring a lot of very modern technology like asynchoronous scrolling of different elements. The Start-Up and I were very happy with the outcome of the website.

Tech Start-Up

This website was developed in conjunction with my work on the app for the Start-Up HeroVet from Latvia. It was a lot of fun to develop this website as I had a lot of freedom for creative idea.

This project was also my first mulitlingual website featuring a Latvian, English and German version. Also I think this is the most modern design of my portfolio and the Start-Up and I are very satisfied with the outcome of the website.

The website can be found here.

Floristry

This website was created for a small local floristry shop located in Hürth, Germany named Casa Flora. Casa Flora already had a website created for them two years prior to our project, but they were not satisfied with their website.

My job was to cut unnecessary content from the website, implement a support for their mobile app, focus the content on their products and implement mobile view support. This were all missing features in their existing website.

The website can be found here.

Religious Institution

This project was the first project I solely made via online communication only. Actually it seemed to be a good thing and it helped with the end result.

The goal was to update an ancient website to a quite modern standard. As this site is in the Religion sector, the design is a lot more conservative and in line with other websites in this sector.

For me personally this project has been the best of all of them. Communication and organisation has been awesome and it worked very smooth.

The website can be found here.

Handy Online Shop

This was my first project involving an online shop. The job was to connect an existing Ebay and Amazon shop inventory with a new online shop. It was a quite difficult task, as the images, logos and colors provided did not match current standard.

This resultet in me having to change around a lot of their designs. In the end the customers were satisfied with their new online shop, which was then fully integrated into their distribution system.

The website can be found here.