BookerMartin Communications

Size: Single-page WordPress website

My professional status: independent web designer/developer

Website client: Frances Martin and Mike Booker

Dates: August - November 2015

Categories: Scoping/pitching/quoting, Client liaison, Project manager, IA & UX, Website designer, Front-end developer, Writing for the web, Content-loader, Responsive web design/dev, CSS-based layout, CSS3, HTML5, WordPress, Small sites

Brief: I met Frances Martin through the webmaster work I did for the Zero Harm website. Frances and her business partner Mike Booker needed a website for their communications company, BookerMartin Communications. They do communications work for both business and government, and wanted a very simple, minimal, responsive website that they could update themselves.

They asked me to quote for a single-page website, based on an existing WordPress theme in order to save time and keep the costs down. Mike and I selected the theme together, based on their requirements, and I built and tested the website, improved various aspects of the design and organised webhosting.

Achievements:

• Together with the client I selected a suitable WordPress theme and then, by tweaking the responsive design functionality and the vertical rhythm, I made it better
• Provided my clients with a simple, comprehensive, easy-to manage responsive website at a very reasonable price.

My responsibilities included:

• Writing the proposal for the website fixed-price contract
• Project management and ongoing liaison with Mike Booker
• Selection, in consultation with Mike, of a suitable WordPress theme, Freelancer by Themefuse, in order to keep the price down and achieve all the functionality we required for the website
• Sorting out hosting for the site with my preferred WordPress webhost, WPEngine
• Tweaking the design to improve some of the responsive functionality as I wasn't completely happy with the position of some of the breakpoints, and there were also some between-breakpoints layout issues that I wanted to fix
• Tweaking the vertical rhythm of the design, which I didn't think was as smooth as it could be in some places
• Tweaking the design to incorporate BookerMartin's logo and some brand colours, as well as adjusting the size and style of various headings and sub-headings
• Building the website and adding the content
• Writing and/or editing the content for some of the page sections where the design required additional text
• Liaising with Mike to ensure that the page sections and content I was creating were appropriate
• Creating new graphics for the website, incorporating some PixelKit icons
• Extensive browser testing of the site at all stages of the development process, across the following browsers and platforms:
  • PC: Chrome (latest), Firefox (latest), Internet Explorer IE8, IE9, IE10
  • Mac: Chrome (latest), Firefox (latest), Safari (latest)
• Extensive device testing at all stages of the development process, across actual devices running the following operating systems, using Adobe Edge to speed up the process:
  • Android 2.3.6 (Gingerbread)
  • Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean)
  • iPhone 4s
  • iPad 4
  • Windows Phone 7
  • Windows Phone 7.5
  • Windows Phone 8
  • BlackBerry OS 6.0
  • Firefox OS
• Additional responsive testing:
  • Using Firefox to emulate different device widths - every pixel width tested from 0 to 1500px
  • Using Chrome to emulate a range of other hand-held devices, filling the gaps in my own device collection
• Editing, proof-reading and tidying up the site once the content had been added
• Creating the favicon
• Carrying out the standard Google Webmaster tasks and adding Google Analytics to the site
• Website launch, A record redirection and and post-launch testing.

An enjoyable little project. It's the first one-pager design I've worked on, and it's good to see there are quite a few nice single-page WordPress themes out there. I hadn't used any themes from Themefuse before, and I appreciated their comprehensive documentation and the ease with which I was able to get the child theme up and running.

I like working with WordPress themes - it's amazing how many different ways there are to update and alter the design and layout, and it's always good fun exploring a new theme, figuring out how each bit works and how to change it.

A well-built theme - which I was pleased to be able to improve upon in terms of the responsive design functionality and the vertical rhythm.