Project
Nail Alley Waipu
Created a fully functioning website for the company Nail Alley. Nail Alley is a growing nail business and offers High Quality, one to one, nail services.
I was approached by a small business Nail Alley to create a website that allowed potential customers to view prices, see salon location, get to know staff and contact staff to book in.
The first step in the process was to gather the client's requirements and they were as follows:
As for look and feel the client allowed me to decide the style and only required that I use the colours from the brand icon.
I got very excited about this project however this led me to make a few mistakes that I would like to share:
Mistake 1: I wanted to do the project as fast as possible to show the client how efficient I was, however, this caused me to miss a crucial step.... Prototyping. I decided to skip this and go straight to making the website. I created a large chunk of the website and showed the client, however she was not pleased.
"The colours are all wrong, I don't like the font and the style seems to generic" - Nail Alley Founder
This was quite disheartening as I had spent quite a-lot of time so far creating the website and there were no requirements given for styling other than it "had to look good". After this I realised something quite important, the client sometimes only knows what they don't want, this is where prototyping and wireframes comes in.
Prototyping is the best way to isolate what the client wants, and sets solid expectations of what the finsihed product will look like.
If I made prototypes, I would of saved myself a huge amount of time, as I can make a prototype in 5% of the time that it takes me to properly develop it. The client didn't give me any styling suggestions other than to use the company colours, from that point I should of made a prototype of what I thought looked good and aligned with other websites in the same industry.
I then could of then taken this back to the client and got some feedback on the direction I was taking the website in. I would have found out a lot earlier that "actually I really like this image as the homepage banner" etc. Back and forward communication could then occur leading to a prototype that the client is happy with. Only then should of development started.
Was a great learning curve for me and it has definitely helped me going forward as I interact with more clients.
Moving on, after the clients feedback after 2 weeks, was able to make a website that the client was happy with. The website was released to production on 17/4/222 with a steady stream of users each day.
I decided to use Webflow to create the website, Webflow is a visual website builder. At first, I thought it would be something aweful (such as Squarespace), however, I was genuinely surprised how they had managed to translate CSS and HTML into a visual editor that is natural to understand for developers. My favorite part of Webflow is that it puts all the abilities of CSS (flex, classes etc) into a graphical interface. Therefore, I can use my existing css knowledge to quickly pick up how to do things and create mobile responsive websites.
It doesn't re-create the wheel with all new ways to do HTML and CSS it uses what currently exists and displays it in an easy-to-use developer interface. Because of this, every setting on Webflow can very easily guessed what CSS or HTML property it relates to, making it very natural for a developer to pick up.
