Right before the New Year, I helped my sister fix up her website. If you have a look at stage 1 below, it was a LOT of text. We'd already done a little something about her old graphics and reorganized some of the navigation links, but still not a warm welcome you'd want to give shoppers. The little blurbs were in random order and peppered with keywords. While this was GREAT for search engines, for humans it was an unappealing swamp of words.

Stage 1: Kim's homepage with new rose graphics. Still too much text!

Since I still haven't learned Dreamweaver or really how to build a website in anything other than Photoshop, I redesigned her homepage to visually represent her products. She hid all those keywords in metatags instead of forcing customers to wade through them. I also revisted her navigation again to further clarify.

The new design in Photoshop. I know, I know! I need to learn Dreamweaver already.

I wonder if I can make time to sit in on Jill's class this semester? Drat, I see it's full. Maybe next semester. (While we're on that, my Photoshop I class still has space. )

While Photoshop does many things well, it really is not web design software. You can make basic sites and it will write html code and make tables, but updating them becomes very problematic. So, the design goes over to Dreamweaver to be coded. There's always a shift in elements and some changes when this is done. Kim did the coding herself and didn't do too bad of a job. We're still working on various parts of the site and maybe I'll finish her business cards this week.

Stage 3: Design translated into Dreamweaver by Kim.