Brushes Bottles N More

The purpose of this website is to inform visitors what Brushes Bottles N More is and the products they sell. The purpose of the site isn’t to directly sell products, but to interest the audience enough so that they navigate to sites (ebay and Amazon) where they can buy the products they want. The site shows off various car detailing products and some before and after photos of how the products get the job done. The target audience is car enthusiasts and small to medium size dealerships/detailing companies. I started the site by determining what pages I thought I was going to need (Home, About Us, Contact, and Products). I copied the main head, header, body, section, and footer tags to each page. The first item I added to each page was a navigation section so that I could move from page to page easily. Then I created the css page so that the styles on each page would be the same or at least similar depending on additional items added. My final step was adding in content (text, images, videos, forms) to make the site’s content and tweaking it to fit my vision. Originally, I really wanted to use the color orange/dark orange, but I found it extremely difficult to find complimentary colors that weren’t too aggressive on the eyes, so I decided purple/blue would be better.

I made each page have the same navigation bar, so visitors wouldn’t have to look for different links in different locations. I also added a section on each page to include the page title that the user is currently on so they don’t get lost in the site. I really tried to make navigation as simple as possible. As stated early, I wanted to use orange within the site, but the only colors that went with orange (in my opinion) were different shades of gray, which eventually felt boring. I found a color wheel tool online that would select complimentary colors for you which is how I ended up with blue and purple (purple was my first choice and blue was selected from the site). Eventually I also added a drop shadow to the images on the site because it added a layer of depth. Before I added the drop shadow, the site looked fine, but I think the shadow really brings the site to life. Typography wasn’t a big deal to me, so I made headings and the navigation bar use the Verdana font family, and the body of the website uses Lucida Bright.

In the future, I’d love to make an actual check out system on the site, so it could actually be used for my parent’s business. I honestly didn’t even look into it for this project because I assumed it would be difficult to implement. I also wish I had a better transparent logo for the site. I didn’t realize that there was still some white space on the logo, so it’s not as clean as I would like, but I don’t have a photo editor at the moment that can make transparent photos. I would also like to make the “Our Products” page easier to navigate. I had plans to make sub-pages for different types of products, but when I decide to do this, I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked. I would also like to have a way to sort through the items (a-z, price, best-selling, etc.). I would also like to implement a search feature in the future. Overall, I feel like my site looks great for someone with no real web-design experience, but I’d still like to make changes to make it more polished.