User Experience and Website Build
This is a small business-owner that is certified to work as a virtual assistant with educational affiliates. The owner needed a website built to reflect her style and desired functionality. The goals included:
1) Online store: Linked images, blogs, and buttons specifically directing purchase of curriculum materials and/or services
2) Marketing: dynamic blog, SEO optimization, Pinterest hover on all images
3) Social media audit and integration
Crafty Curriculum
Creating inspirational and engagement connection with users.
GOAL: Design a website that is connected to a storefront, a multi-page blog, pinterest, and social media. Connect branding and voice to elevate CC’s professional online presence and prompt users to book services or purchase materials.
PROCESS: The process included a competitive analysis, UI kit, prototyping navigation flow, persona and user journey map, UX design iteration, mobile-responsive testing, and full build on staging site.
Initial Research & Personas
The client aims to market herself as creative and welcoming, all the while positioning herself as the safe place to land for educators and mothers looking to simplify and enrich their time with children. Her website serves as a marketing tool for her Pinterest page to land, and an active resource for educators and caregivers.
Looking ahead, the client’s website will prioritize SEO and Pinterest-friendly images to ensure an engaging and efficient user experience. Stylistic choices will reflect the brand’s warm and engaging identity, while streamlined information will improve navigation and accessibility. Integrating social media feeds will foster greater reach and connectivity, and strategically incorporating keywords will enhance search visibility, ensuring the site reaches the right audience.
UI Sticker Sheet & Style Guide
This UI kit presents a cohesive design system with a strong emphasis on bold typography, a red, black, and white color scheme, and a structured layout. The typography features Gotham Black Regular for headers, Porcelain (capitalized) for subheaders, and Roboto for paragraphs, ensuring readability and a friendly aesthetic.
The color palette consists of blush, cream, and navy, creating a feminine and dynamic look. Buttons are designed with clear hover states, transitioning from gray or white backgrounds to a faded focus, or with an enlarged hover. The dropdown menu follows a opaque theme, reinforcing a chic and subtle interface.
Icons and graphics are designed with a navy circle outline style, maintaining brand consistency. The testimonial section is cleanly structured with mint accents, and user feedback is drop shadowed for emphasis. Overall, this UI kit ensures a clean, winsome, and professional brand presence while maintaining usability and consistency across digital platforms.
Pinterest-Friendly Approach
It was imperative for this website to anchor the myriad of information marketed through Pinterest. Each image uploaded to the site had a “Pin it!” hover feature, and the branding was seamless throughout platforms.
Final Thoughts
Working with my client on this one was a fantastic experience. It isn’t hard to develop user empathy when I am an example of one of her target audience members! We worked together to successfully integrate a storefront, an active blog, social media, and Pinterest-friendly images. Additionally, at the time of launch, we had a greenlight SEO score and I’m sure it is something that my client continues to improve with every new upload. In the future, the website and digital products may require a brand audit, to ensure that all of the assets are aligned with the branding.
The challenge was in blending Crafty Curriculum’s friendly aesthetic with selling digital products, sharing the site through Pinterest, and finding the website easily through high SEO scores. We needed to work together in order to build and prototype effective designs that held both the visual appeal and the human centered usability. My client and I brought multiple skills and insights to this project, generating a strong final solution.
Moving Forward
Once the site was launched, I was tasked with working on increasing SEO for the site. Additionally, I continued to work with the developer to ensure that the integrity of the site and features accomplished our capabilities goals after the launch.
The client expressed high satisfaction with the website and the branding materials, and we will continue to assess and measure their customer-facing marketing and design approaches into the future.