Chicago based firm Red Spade Environments needed a site to reflect its professional but friendly and hands-on approach to landscape architecture. Six Pony Hitch hired Tamara Olson Designs to plan the user experience of the site and build it using WordPress.
Part I: User Experience
We began with a kickoff meeting with the client to better understand their needs and wants for the website. It quickly became clear that Red Spade had a unique story to tell. Creating a wireframe helped craft the narrative in broad strokes, giving both the visual designer and the copywriter a structure and starting point.
Part II: Visual Design
The next step involved Six Pony Hitch taking the design from UX concept to full-fledged visual design. Beautiful photography and the strong use of the color red helped showcase Red Spade’s brand.
Part III: WordPress Development
In the kickoff meeting, Red Spade identified sites they liked — and most included sites with lots of fun animations and micro-interactions, so from the beginning, we were stoked about being able to play around with some fun CSS3 and jQuery animations. Below are a few of the tools we used.
- Sticky Menu
- Back to Top bug
- Animations on Team Member hover
- Photo Gallery
- Back to Top bug
- Animations on Team Member hover
- Photo Gallery
And as always, we made sure to design a back-end that was intuitive and easy for the client to update. (It included all the usual suspects: Advanced Custom Fields, Yoast, Contact Form 7, etc.) For this UI, I also used Admin Editor Pro to pare down the WordPress back-end to the absolute bare minimum.
