Lizzie Lu Sweets

Request

Design, develop, and build out a small business eCommerce website. Help out a family friend 🙂

Solution

Lizzie Lu Sweets is co-owned by a close friend of my wife. While X is an amazing Producer (Food Channel, etc) who knows how to tell compelling stories through video, he didn’t understand what creating a web presence truly entails. In addition, he admittedly didn’t understand what the current trends were in Modern Web design.

When I started talking about “mobile first”, “responsive” and “jQuery”, he went along for the ride – clearly communicating that he had no idea what the heck I was talking about.

• I created a Mind Map and walked him through the process of creating a site – from cradle to grave.
• We talked about the different “gates” that professional development goes through.
• I communicated the importance of wire-frames to discover and define how the end-user would interact with the site.
• I produced design motifs composites derived from source material that inspired him.
• We looked at current trends (like awesome one “pagers”and responsive designs that honor delivery systems) and talked about how they created a more intuitive interface.
• I showed him what was a ticketing system is and how we define scope and track metrics during development.
• I built out the site, based on wireframes, that focused on functionality first — over design.
• I illustrated how the “front-end” theme simply presents the data-points you give it – in the places denoted by the wires.
• Along the way, I taught X how to use a modern CMS to extend his marketing reach and grow his business.
• Finally, we spent several QA sessions to put on the finishing touches and stomp out annoying bugs.

On an unglamorous day, I pushed the site from dev to production.