using my head

It has been a super-busy month, and I’ve been whirling like a dervish. But the great news is I’ve just completed another Squarespace website, this time for an amazing event and set design company: Vivid Design Works. Caroline, Vivid’s managing director, wanted an online showcase for their work in designing sets, interiors and events, so I was thrilled to work with such a creative company, which meant I would get to exercise some real creativity in the design. The web design needed to be understated yet bold – if you can have such a thing – to reflect the company spirit of vivacity, but still allow the images of their work to stand out.

The winning concept was to have the website designed as though you were looking down at one of the Vivid designers’ desks, with some of the elements they might have there: scraps of paper, a sketchbook, masking tape, slides and photos from a mood board. I really like the end result, and feel the dark grey sets off the client images nicely, with the red accents adding the right amount of Vivid punch. Have a look for yourself and let me know what you think

This is my 7th Squarespace website to go live in 6 months, and  I must say I am really pleased with the speed at which I can deliver polished, custom websites to my clients. I can’t imagine having been able to deliver this quantity – and quality – of sites with all the features in the same amount of time using any other system. So far, all clients have fallen in love with the ease at which they can edit their websites, and we are both impressed with the sophistication and broad feature set that you get, for around the same price as regular web hosting that comes without a CMS.

Naturally, there are some limitations and things that Squarespace could do better… if I can find time to breathe I will try to summarise them in another post. But overall, I am pleased as punch – and in fact I’ve got to get back to work on yet another Squarespace site due to launch next week. Whew!

When the lovely people at Festinho got in touch, they needed to get a website live within a few days. Their existing site had been mostly designed and built already, but because it was created as a static HTML site, they couldn’t edit the content themselves. And before the site could go live, they needed to make some content changes. As Festinho is a charity festival, they rely on volunteers to do everything, so they needed something that key volunteers could access and edit easily without much training, so they didn’t need to rely on others or pay someone to edit things for them.

It’s a great cause, so I was happy to help out, and because Squarespace makes it so easy to design, build, and edit a website, it seemed the right tool to use. They already had a visual design, so I was able to translate this into a working ‘empty shell’ website in the Squarespace content management system within 24 hours. Within 96 hours, they had a fully-functioning website with all 43 pages of content in place, including blog, photo galleries, and contact form. Within 98 hours they had been trained on how to edit the site through the simple Squarespace CMS.

We’re still finetuning a few things, but the great news is that we were able to launch before their deadline – how often does that happen, especially when the deadline is less than a week?! Have a look at www.festinho.com and while you’re there, why not get yourself a ticket to the festival? It’s a magical weekend in the countryside, with all proceeds going to support Brazil’s needy children.