My most recent project was pro bono (free) work I did for a friend to help him in his career search.Two positive aspects of the result were the header and the push for a more professional look. Now I'm gonna give my current boss some props ... in our small discussions about sites with a white background versus sites with a colored bg, the white bg in the content area proved a plus. With a simple small site such as this one and a learning experience from previous sites (white text on dark backgrounds and I watched the project dissappear into oblivion), I made a different choice.
The other aspect was the header background graphic - a mistake that turned out better. When doing the background graphic for the header I was going for a simple gradient. In my Photoshop file, I made the image 1 pixel two wide and when I saw the result, it looked better. It added something to it, not sure quite what it was; but it just looked better.
The client liked it and the Google analytics on the site's first day were better than expected. Some of those stats may have been carryover from last night's tweeks, so this next week will tell more. But I can share with the client areas of interest. He had a targeted location where this site was to be primarily viewed from, and although those results didn't show, he made it out of Texas.
The improvement on this project was that I learned I need to get to a design quiker. Although I did work in more of a development process (put the content in and worked the design around the content instead of the other way around), too much time went into finding the right design. I stopeed looking at dozens of templates at one time and just continued to build the site then come back and upgrade the design features to more attractive design.
Here's the remaining pages. All the content, including images within the content, was supplied by the client.
