- The Project: Design and development of a new site for Cloud 9 Care - a home care and personal care services company in Essex.
- What I Did: Manage the project. Work with a trusted freelance designer. Build a fully responsive site. Install and customise a content management system.
- Result: The website launched in August 2015.
The previous website was several years old and we needed to modernise the design and the content management system behind the site. The client wanted to be able to add News articles and manage other aspects of the site via an easy-to-use control panel.
Design and branding
On this project, I outsourced the design of the site to Liz Elcoate, a talented, trusted, freelance designer that I work with. I provided the website design brief based on discussion and information from the client, Cloud 9 Care. The brief was to provide a friendly, simple and efficient - not flashy or clever - portrait of the company. Additionally, the primary colour needed to follow the company's "ladies in red" moniker (their uniform is red) and had to be part of the new design.
The company logo was very old-fashioned and this was completely redesigned to provide a modern and clean logo. The site's design presents this in a modern layout that uses high quality imagery.
Web development
The site is fully responsive and its layout adapts to the different screen sizes of mobile devices, including smartphones and tablet PCs like iPads.
The site needed a simple and powerful content management system and I chose to use Perch. This is an easy to use system that can be extended as required.
Overall
This was a rewarding project to work on. I enjoyed building the site and changed part of my coding process as I did it. This will make me more efficient for other custom built sites. Once again, it was great to develop the site with Perch. It's an awesome system.
In many ways, this project is an archetypal example of the type of sites that I want and that I love to build. More please!
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Is there a way that you could use Perch to mimic the layout of WordPress?
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@Patrick: Any site can be made to look like another with the appropriate CSS and HTML structure. Is that what you mean? Depending on the site, the functionality could be closely similar as well. However, most sites need to have their requirements planned and the appropriate systems, WordPress or Perch or another, chosen on that basis I’d say.