Shawnalea Shelly – Website

About a month ago, one of my friends called me and referred me a client. Her name was Shawnalea Shelly. She is an ergonomist in Oregon. Some of you are probably thinking, “What is an ergonomist, or better yet, what is ergonomics?” Ergonomics is the technology concerned with the design, manufacture, and arrangement of products and environments to be safe, healthy, and comfortable for human beings.

Shawnalea came to me with some basic goals in mind.
She wanted a website that portrayed a professional image.
She also wanted to build her web presence on Google, and a new website is a great way to do that. We talked about her design preferences and her likes/dislikes and her taste, and soon after, I went to work. I wanted to design a website to look very clean, simple, and have a business feeling to it. I also wanted to add a little bit of a feminine touch to it. I didn’t want it to look like a very masculine website. That led me to use a muted color scheme of purple, white, light blues, and gray. Because the site had lots of text, I didn’t want the reader to get bored so I placed different stock images throughout the site that helped break up the content a bit.

As far as the coding was concerned, I made sure that the site was valid XHTML/CSS, and I also made sure that the mark-up used good SEO techniques, as this was one of her goals. I used image-replacement techniques, as well as a good hierarchical structure for the heading tags. I added titles to all the links, and alt text to all the images. I’m also a bit picky with the way I organize my CSS, so I made sure that the CSS file was well commented.

She wanted the site to have some flair and effects to it, so on the homepage, I incorporated a rotating jquery banner. We also had a testimonial scroller on the front page. We also implemented a neat feature with the “Ask an Expert” area on the header. When you clicked on it, the top area would slide down and reveal a contact form, which I’m pretty excited about. The site took me about 3 days to get the design down, and these last 3 days, I have been coding away.

In conclusion, I believe that this project turned out pretty well. Now Shawnalea has a website that she can be proud of. Go take a look at Shawnalea Shelly’s website.