Get to know a little bit about Bob...

After retiring from a career in Computer Aided Design, Bob developed a fascination with his wife's embroidery machine. He quickly noticed that many of the companies she purchased designs from seemed to specialize in feminine designs. So he decided to try his hand at developing some more masculine designs. When his loving wife, Dottie, shared pictures of some of his completed designs with her machine embroidery groups on social media, many of her fellow embroiderers wanted to know where they could purchase them. And Bob's Bodacious 'Broidery' (Bob loves alliteration) was born.

Recently, Bob and Dottie decided their little business needed more of an internet presence than just a few social media pages. Not being familiar with the ins and outs of web design they contracted AKJ Designs to build their website. The current page isn't intended to be a full ecommerce portal at this time, it's just a way for the business to reach a broader audience and see if the demand would bear the cost of a full ecommerce portal. Having chosen to continue to use Paypal's invoicing system to handle the payment process, each page of designs has an order form that will email Bob the user's request for a specific design in a specific format, allowing Bob to send the customer a Paypal invoice for the requested design and to receive payment before emailing the a copy of the ordered file.

When designing this website, it was important that the color scheme give the site a masculine feel. It was also important that the color scheme and the choice of graphics not distract the user from the content since the overall goal of the site is to make a sale. During the initial design process, the plan was to use a khaki color for much of the site's text but this design choice recieved some critical feedback. It seemed that it was too difficult to read. The text was switched to black with a lighter shade of the khaki color used for the background on the table. A basic photo of denim was chosen for the background image of the site because of its simple, masculine feel. The stitched monogram-style logo also helps to give the site a more masculine feel. The top navigation bar was utilized in the website design because it is a style of navigation that is user-friendly and familiar to most users. Additionally, all of the photos on the homepage are clickable links to the page they are associated with. This makes the navigation a little more intuitive.

Future plans for the website include incorporating an online shopping cart and also expanding the types of designs offered. Additional pages would include one for in-the-hoop designs, and potentially a blog. It would also be nice to include a link to the company's Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook feeds. Additionally, the page would benefit from being restyled to be more mobile-compatible in the future. If the designer had more time, it would have been nice to be able to include more images on most of the pages. The photo gallery definitely needs more images of finished products so that the planned for slideshow could have been incorporated.