e-timpa.com

Sometimes a client comes to you wanting something impossible. Sometimes they have their head so far in the future you don’t know what to think.

Redesigning for Garth Male Grooming wasn’t the case.

The original spec was to add back end functionality. Pricing and specials were hard coded and required hours and dollars to update. Which simply isn’t acceptable. You need to be able to move and adapt with the times.
While looking over the content to see what could be database driven I noticed an appaling colour scheme.
Primarily a lack of. The entire site was in one shade of brown. Which while inspired by wood, didn’t match the rich colours of being inside the studio.

It just didnt work well.

A new design and colour scheme was in order. But we needed to keep the design in the same landscape style for consistency and because it worked well. After a trip to the studio to see how it felt up close and personal, a new look site was developed.

The bland brown was replaced with a rich burgundy and moved to the border. Olive green like a high back leather chair formed the menu bar and to add that final polish and bring it forward into the modern age, a glossy orange “Book Now” button was literally slapped on top of the site.
The end result?

We have something fresh and new.
Retaining the style and feel of the original site but brought well forward into the modern age and updated.

Features:

• Cross browser tableless design
• database driven site core
• Simple admin interface
• Natural colour scheme

The other major feature added as a part of the redevelopment was a contact form. Interactively built into each page.

Javascript calls the frame into visibility and allows visitors to refer the site to a friend. Captured name and email addresses are inserted into an email body.
This gives the personalisation of a friends email and the business side Garth needed.
To avoid sounding cliche or like SPAM, the email clearly indicates it has come from a business, but at your friends request.

Between multiple types of content, more or less screen real estate needed to be used. This is covered seamlessly by moving and fading the background image. The face in the background slides to the left and fades in opacity when viewing the treatments and other pages with a lot of text. This is unnoticed by the viewer as we keep the vertical stripes in full colour.

Visual elements remain constant and the user continues on.

The final element was to add an element of change to an otherwise static page. This was pushed with a random loading image.
The right pane of the site is an oversize thumbnail loaded at random.
Statistically speaking, the average site visitor will view 5 pages on Garth before making a booking or knowing what they want. With 13 images to choose from, this should give over 90% of visitors a unique image on each page load.

The client is incredibly happy with the makeover and apart from some domain hiccups Garth is now hosted and live. For all you tech monkeys I’ll have another article up in a week or so around the CSS used and how I’ve accomodated an IE6 rendering bug.
For the rest of you www.garthmalegrooming.com.au and tell them Timps sent you.