Client: Summit K12
Background
Summit K12 came to Standard Beagle to design and develop their main website that would eventually lead to incorporating e commerce (which we have now done as well). Summit K12 provides educational materials to schools and was introducing a brand new line of eBooks and instructional materials for teachers. The company chose a Genesis theme that we were able to change the design according to their specific needs.
Design Part 1 – Style Guide
I designed two style guide choices for the client to choose from. The first style guide option used several shades of blue with a highlight of yellow to instill trust and confidence. This style was more simplistic. On both style guides I designed the headers to have more than normal tracking between the letters to make it very easy to read. Legibility of the type also has a lot to do with the color contrasts used, which I kept in mind when designing both style guides. The second style guide incorporated blues, gray, and red to show their passion and devotion to what they do. Using red is also stimulating and attention grabbing.
Design Part 2 – Sketches
The sketches I designed went through different iterations of the home page that involved lots of collaboration with my team. I also sketched out different pages like ‘About Us,’ ‘Resources,’ Single Subject Page,’ ‘Testimonials,’ Top-level Pages,’ etc.
Design Part 3 – Wireframes
When I moved onto the wireframes I was able to easily create them based upon my sketches without many changes. I wanted to ensure there was a strong call to action in place because the client was trying to sell a product and ultimately wanted the users to land back on product pages or subject pages.
Final Product
After the wireframes were approved by the client our team of developers was able to move onto site development. I designed a user friendly search to be able to find the company’s alignment guides, and our developers were able to develop the search using PHP, Javascript, and Ajax, which overall reduced load time. We were able to provide them with a stunning design that was customized to their needs of being user friendly with large amount of content on the site.
