I’m going to introduce a new feature to the blog with today’s post. In these posts, I’ll feature information on how a Web site was designed. Some of you do Web design and others simply have a site for your business. With each post, I hope you will learn more about the process. As with any kind of design, it is sometimes best to do it yourself and other times it is more important to let someone else do the heavy lifting for you.

As many of you use CorelDRAW, I know there is temptation to use Corel Website Creator as Corel has included it with the last few versions of CorelDRAW Graphics Suite. I urge you to read Corel Website Creator Poor Choice for Web Sites before you go down that path.

Today one of the best choices is WordPress as it allows a site to be developed in less time than coding everything manually while still creating a very attractive and functional site. The site I’m going to discuss in this post was originally developed in Adobe Imageready. While the site was attractive, it was extremely difficult and time consuming to update. After meeting with the artist, we decided to rebuilt the site from scratch on the WordPress platform.

Karen Friend of Soaring Spirit Studio takes gourds and turns them into artistic masterpieces that she displays and sells at shows throughout the year. Below is a screenshot of the gallery on the redesigned site.

For this project, the most time-consuming aspect was prepping all of the photos for the gallery. Karen was very helpful in providing us with good original photos of all of her pieces. Sometimes it is very difficult for clients to provide photos or text for their sites and she was wonderful in giving us the info we needed. By doing this, we complete the design in a lot less time and therefore she saved herself a lot of money.

A very important aspect of the design process is choosing a good WordPress theme. We work closely with the client to select a theme that is both functional and the right layout for their site. After suggesting several options to Karen, she selected the Fotografia theme.

We had the ability to customize the color scheme and layout to give her a site she loved. It also had various gallery options that gave us the ability to show off the many gourds she has created. If you are an artist, we can heartily recommend the Fotografia theme as an excellent choice. For those who want help in designing the perfect Web site, please contact us and we’ll discuss your project.