PracticeWeb is a Bristol-based marketing agency that specialises in strategy, insight, and websites for accounting professionals.
I joined PWeb as a Junior web designer in January '20. My main job was designing and building websites using Divi, a WordPress visual page builder. In my time there I've shipped 26 websites; now it's time to summarise my experience, so here's an overview of my most favourite projects.
Overview:
Five projects I enjoyed working on the most
Bonus: what to do when your client 'hates stock'
Established, carefully planned out workflow can save you a significant amount of time; the more projects I completed, the better I could see the outlines of a site building process that worked best for me.
I'd always start my projects with a quick information gathering phase, where I'd go through all available project documents and download any assets supplied by the client. It is followed by doing any additional research needed, be it checking out the competition or simply gathering some inspiration. Based on all that I'd then start choosing fonts and colours, and help my project manager to finalise the site structure.
Depending on the complexity and the scope of the project, I would sometimes create detailed moodboards to show to the client before the design phase starts – it is usually needed when the results of the gut test are not so straightforward and some clarification on the preferred design direction is required.
<aside> 🔎 Examples of the moodboards I did for my clients: one, two
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Normally we would use user flow charts to confirm the content of each page and show the client how the pages are linked together; when a more in-depth conversation is needed, I'd put together low-fi wireframes of the key pages like Home, About or Services. I usually make them in Figma and use a web wireframing kit by Platforma 2 to speed things up.
Being more graphic and self-explanatory, wireframes help to make sure everyone is on board with the structure proposed even in the most complicated cases.