Custom website design & build
Skills & Tools
A custom website design and build, for a new corporate hospitality company.
Design challenge
Outline
As a startup business in hospitality, Experience First was targeting large corporates. The founder therefore prioritised a professional, fit-for-purpose website as a business requirement. They just couldn't grow with the original DIY website.
They asked me to design and build a custom site for their full launch, with two big goals:
- Look like an established business from day one, in order to attract the trust and business of the right companies.
- Easy for the website manager organise and make changes, as events content is constantly changing.
Not only was the visual style custom designed, the events setup was also tailored to their needs. Individual events are managed through a custom post type (ACF plugin) which allowed them to be inserted into topic pages, as sections.
The main events calendar was also a custom setup, which takes events placed in the client's Outlook calendar and feeds it into the Calendar page on the website. The feed also populates the ‘Upcoming dates’ section on some event pages.
The development work on this project was done in partnership with digitalgarden.co, a regular collaborator on my WordPress projects.
Process & solution
Impact & learnings
The client was very happy and impressed with the result, and was able to give the impression of an established business from day one. Without this custom approach he would still be using his original DIY website which was holding back growth.
Our goal was to make the website and it’s design look as good as, or better than it's competitors. I think we’ve certainly achieved that.
Projects like this are a reminder to me of the value of some attention to detail, even on a small site, which can work wonders for startup businesses. This wasn’t a big project, but the effect of the change is massive.
Mark was amazing, and the website was just what I had hoped for. He took the time to understand my requirements, and his attention to detail resulted in an excellent finished site. I highly recommend Mark for any future website projects you or your business may have.
Let’s work together
Based in the UK & available for fractional, part-time or for projects- 30 years experience as a designer & creator
- Multi-skilled in digital design, UX, prototypes & web dev
