May 31, 2008
3 Hour Site Facelift
Yesterday a close friend and co-worker of mine approached me asking me if I could offer some very minor help to a friend of hers who needs her web site up by tomorrow. OK, it’s short notice, but I’d be glad to talk to her.
She sells baskets to parents who want to send their child a unique care package while they are away at summer camp. A very neat idea.
She told me that the person she had hired to do the job was not returning phone calls or emails, and she didn’t know what she would do, but she’d probably shut down the site completely. I took a look at the site, and was horrified. I tried to remain calm on the phone with her, but it was obvious the site needed A LOT of work.
THE BEFORE
She gave me the username and password, so I went into her server and started changing around bits of text here and there, but in good conscious, I just couldn’t leave it as it was. So, last night, I spent 3 hours and gave her site quick facelift for Baskets by Karon.
THE AFTER
Now it’s only a one-page site, but it does all that she needs it to do, and it directs it to the shopping cart. I couldn’t do much to make the osCommerce shopping cart experience better in that short of time. It’s old and desperately needs to go changed too. Shopping carts have come along way. At Right From The Heart, we have a small store that uses Shopify, and it’s great.
UPDATE (6/10/08): osCommerce was having many more issues than I first expected, so I went ahead switched her store to Shopify, and it turned out great so far.
9 responses so far ↓
1 Yannick // May 31, 2008 at 10:30 pm
It definitely looks a whole lot better than the previous design. Good job Andy!
2 Matt Donovan // Jun 1, 2008 at 12:37 pm
That’s some nice work in 3 hours. I especially like the large link targets in the main nav. Did you consider using some jquery auto scroll for the links to the in-page anchor points? It would be a quick addition that would make the jump down the page less jarring.
Either way, this is a dramatic improvement. Good work, bro.
3 Andy // Jun 1, 2008 at 4:08 pm
@Yannick: Thanks man.
@Matt: Thanks and great idea about the auto scrolling technique. I just put that into place.
4 Lawrence Salberg // Jun 2, 2008 at 12:13 am
Three hours? Earth hours? Unbelievable. You’s a genius.
Well, I guess the content was there, and by keeping it clean and neat, you really made it look nicer by getting RID of stuff. Add a few nice elements and it looks very nice.
Now, perhaps a few more hours to give it some XHTML 1.0 Strict love?
But seriously, I’m sure she’s super-happy – and that almost always counts for everything.
5 Thomas Jenkins // Jun 2, 2008 at 7:45 am
Very nice as usual… Like Lawrence said “Three hours? Earth Hours?” I would have still been pondering about the menu. Very slick and modernized for a simple one pager.
6 Andy // Jun 2, 2008 at 8:46 am
@Lawrence: Thanks. It didn’t take long because I could rip down the whole thing and start over just going for simplicity. Honestly, making the code validate never crossed my mind. I was trying to get it done quickly and make it look nice. I probably should go back and do it, but I’m not all that worried about it.
@Thomas: Thanks.
7 chuck // Jun 2, 2008 at 8:47 am
That smooth-scrolling to the anchor points is slick … great idea, @Matt. By doing what you did, you made the web a better place. No one should have to have a site like the old one. I’ll bet this was fun to do, albeit rushed.
Nice work, man.
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