In February I was asked by the Alta Team to join them in their efforts to redesign their website. Alta is known as the premiere print shop of Gainesville and North Florida. Ata has over 26 years of experience and pride themselves on their friendly staff and community roots. So, needless to say I was very excited to work for this reputable company!
Alta traditionally has offered print services. When I met with the team and discussed the project I was very excited to hear that they are now expanding their services to the online market as well. For their redesign they wanted something that was fresh and friendly. They are very confident in selling not only a traditional product and service to a consumer but they also want the consumer to realize that they are also gaining a strong, reliable professional relationship. Alta treats their customers like their family – they want you to be comfortable and feel like you can go to them with for any of your marketing questions or needs.
A tight deadline was given for this project but I felt confident in accomplishing the task as they were prepared with a project manager, content writers, and photographer while I took the reigns on the design and HTML/CSS. For this initial phase we decided to push the simple static version of the site and are choosing to integrate this into a CMS in the near future.
In our initial design discovery meeting Alta expressed they wanted a look that was layered and had depth. They wanted fresh colors of greens and blues to accentuate their eco-friendly business approaches, and they wanted friendly icons to make the text more visually appealing.
For the design I worked with Fireworks and pulled out the trusty grid-based layout template. Having this template has been a great resource in efficiency and it is a great visual guide to guarantee perfect visual spacing.
Alta expressed they wanted a seamless background that would look nice in all browsers. I went into Photoshop and created an abstract blue banner that would fill the background as a bar and added depth to this piece so elements falling on top felt as though they were layered. For the navigation I made it layered over the brown and grey to add that next element of layering. I wanted a nice background for the main content areas so I played around with drop shadows on simple lines to add a clean visual separator. The footer is a light color that reflects the same visual pattern as the strong blue banner to bring in the consistency of the elements.
From there the pages began to lay themselves out. I wanted the design to have flexibility for the future – easily take elements out and put elements in. The elements bring in a personality and character to this site that evokes a community-based, friendly feel. In the end we made our deadlines and I am very happy with the process!
The site turned out great, nice work.