About

Documentation of the Development Process

1. Explain to your audience the intent and purpose behind this website. What steps did you take in creating the website that ensured you met your objectives?

The focus of this website is to promote consulting services to attract small businesses with a need for outsourced financial planning and accounting. Small businesses are always looking for ways to minimize their administrative burden so they can focus on growing their businesses through marketing campaigns and/or other networking activities. They are also looking for accurate reporting for tax purposes and to gauge company performance. The goal for this website is to drive more traffic and get prospective clients to fill out a customer contact form to join the mailing list. In addition, the most compelling action is for the prospective client to call directly and request a free consultation. In order to prepare for the creation of this website, I researched a variety of local businesses that offered similar services. I payed close attention to layout, responsiveness and design aesthetics.

Defense of the Final Product

2. Why did you make the specific design choices that you did? For each of your website’s pages, explain your rationale for the overall design, as well as the individual components (colors, typography, etc.). Support your choices with evidence of your consideration of the end user. What did you do to make your website engaging, professional, and easy to use?

For these pages, I didn't want to overwhelm the user with a bunch of unnecessary graphics. However, I did want to include some images and videos to entice users to continue to explore. I thought a simple color scheme of gradient blues and grays with some "Pop" of orange and neon green would be easy on the eyes to read while emphasizing elements on the page such as the logo and key services. The font I chose to use throughout the site is "Optima" part of the sans serif family of fonts. For the "showcase," in the Home Page, I chose a more traditional font "arial black" and increased the font-size for a more dramatic effect. For consistency, I chose to flow the header and footer throughout each of the pages while only editing the content in the body of each page. I feel this method provides the user with a consistent flow from page to page. The navigation bar is responsive and allows the user to view the "active" page they are on by highlighting the page title. I've also added a hover element so each page was clearly identified as the user hovers over each page link.

Opportunities for Improvement and Growth

3. Finally, explain what else you might like to do with this website in the future. What could you have done differently if you had more time or resources? What sorts of content, capabilities, pages, etc. might you want to include in future updates?

In the future, I would like to incorporate some additonal functions and optimization. I would like to have added more "animated" features, forms and a newsletter. I think I would also add an blog page to include current information about industry trends.