Granite Worktops (UK) Ltd were my first client in February 2001 when I created the orangey coloured site you see as the 'old site' or 'before' image (the colour was the clients choice). In January of 2003 they said about that site "it's unbelievable the number of people who compliment us on the site, it leaves others standing".
In February 2003 we decided to overhaul the site to add a new range of SileStones and to reflect the fact that the company had changed its name. I proposed about £1,000 of work.
The site was completely re-designed. Visually, the client wanted a strong opening page using stunning new installation photographs to which I added the frosted glass display panel effect. The colour scheme was based on colours in this photograph. For navigation, I tested a number of menu systems and purchased the best I could find which gives us a drop down menu that's very easy to use and works in all the browsers I've tried.
One of the biggest requirements from the client was to be able to print the site as a brochure, so I created an additional stylesheet for printed output, which basically means we are in control of things like pagination.
Each web page prints on a single page, so the size of the stone samples had to be kept small. Online stone samples are a great persuader, however, so I used PHP (a programming language) to write a generic web page that would display a larger image of whichever stone sample the user clicked. Just having one such page rather means easier (and cheaper) maintenance in future.
The site was made more persuasive by writing information for people at all buying stages, including generic information about stone, how to choose between different stones, the detailed information about different stones available and then instructions about how to order.
To explain the various terms, we included a glossary.
I worked lightly on the project for almost nine months from start to finish and in the end it took about 120 hours to complete. The client said "my old site seems old-fashioned now that I have seen what you are doing to my new site", "the way it is set out, I think is an outstanding and brilliant job done by yourself", and "thanks mate for all your hard work, the website looks fantastic, you have done a brilliant job".