Creating a Website for a Yoga Teacher
In February, 2009, I created my first contract website. One friend introduced me to her friend – a local Yoga teacher. As a Yoga teacher Amy Dara is happy teaching group classes, but is also interested in pursuing workshops, etc. In recognition of that, she already had a website, but she was unhappy with several facets of the site.
Her old website did not represent well what she had to offer. In addition, any time she had a schedule change, or a new workshop added, it was labor intensive to make changes to the site. As we discussed what she wanted, she realized the benefits of being on a content management system, and we settled on WordPress.
I was clear with her that I wouldn’t be able to deliver on her entire wish list for the new site. (She had a very limited budget for creating a whole new site.) I gave her the metaphor of a house: that we weren’t doing a high end design/build job, but rather quick and dirty pre-fab construction. The goals of the new site were to have something that she could update herself, and to bring her look a little further into the millennium.
I picked out a free template, edited her old content, and put up the new site. The central navigation for her new website is a slide. I think this non-traditional navigation adds visual appeal and visual interest to the home page. We also added some basic search engine optimization into the new site, which is helping her placement in search responses.
I faced two challenges creating the site. The client had very few images to work with, and the slide required at least six. Also, visually, the slide was most effective (I found out from experimentation) with bold colors. In order to get the colors I needed, I ended up stealing images from the web and working with them to use on her site. While in the wish list the client would have a dark blue background, and a finer font, I wasn’t able to deliver that on this contract.
I’m very pleased with the value for the money that I provided. I’m still unhappy that she didn’t get her dream site, but I have noticed that she updates the site regularly, and I know she’s glad to be able to do that for herself.
