Client-Led WordPress Website Design: The Rules of Life Book Series Site

For many individuals or small businesses, one of the biggest challenges when building a website is identifying the correct approach for the development process. For each new project, the developer must understand the client’s needs including budget, the site’s expected lifespan, the client’s desired level of involvement, and especially the site’s intended audience and function. When a client isn’t involved in those choices and isn’t adequately educated on the site building process, there can be major problems before the development process even gets started. The development process may become a headache, and often the client will wind up dissatisfied with their website upon launch. It’s easy to understand why; after they’ve dropped a hefty sum on the site, it’s still not what they had envisioned, but at that point the client feels helpless to create change and achieve their vision.

At Berry Interesting, we believe in doing things differently. One of our goals is to make sure we understand the client’s priorities at the beginning of our relationship so we can create customized products and find tailored solutions that meet our clients’ needs.

Berry Interesting client Melissa Abbott-Cooke, author of The Rules of Life book series, is a great example of how our process works. Melissa needed a WordPress website to promote herself and her new book series to publishers. Unfortunately, a bad experience with another web development agency left her frustrated:

I hired a well-known web design company to create my site. Two months after launch, it was clear my site needed a makeover. The design process with the company was riddled with miscommunication and critical updates lost in a maze of conference calls and emails. This was my first website. I was relying on their expertise to guide me on design, but their advice was rare. My site was more important to me than to them; I was just another widget. Frustrated, I tried to update the site myself, but their coding made my changes impossible to make.

Click the thumbnails above to see Melissa’s ideas for site, composed in PowerPoint. You can also review the design elements used during design brainstorming (download the .pptx file).

Melissa’s original choice in a partner for helping bring her website to live backed her into a corner. Working with an agency that had their own goals in mind rather than with a team prepared to work closely with her to balance her design aesthetic against the practical demands of the job left her feeling dissatisfied with her site and frustrated at its limitations. She turned to Berry Interesting looking for a different kind of experience and found a new way of doing things that worked much better for her:

Commitment-shy but determined, I arrived at my meeting with D’nelle with a two-page PowerPoint mock-up of my site. Fairy godmother wand in hand, she spoke truths of website design that my lack of experience couldn’t articulate. A week later, D’nelle and her team at Berry Interesting took us by the hand and into the world of website design showing us just enough while they artfully managed the details.

In Melissa’s case, the design of her site, like the composition of her novels, was extremely important to her. Although she was limited in her ability to provide graphics and assets by her own knowledge of design tools, she was quite clear on what she wanted the site to look like and what she needed it to do. Thanks to careful listening combined with years of development experience, D’nelle and the Berry Interesting team were able to bring Melissa’s dream to life:

Their insights and expertise with WordPress created a website that’s not only engaging but easy to manage in the post-launch world. I was astounded by their project management, ahead of the game and never behind or losing a piece of information. Most importantly, it is their integrity and work ethic, so involved in the process of my site’s creation that they would tweak little details that made a huge difference in the user experience, running them by me to see what I thought. The whole process worked so quickly and so easily, I had to keep pinching myself. They went above and beyond in so many cases, pushing themselves and guiding me to what I couldn’t imagine my site could be, with the newest and brightest.

Click above to see screenshots of Melissa’s new site at launch, or visit the site directly.

Ultimately, this author’s story has a happy ending: Melissa got a new website that looked and worked the way she wanted it to and a positive web design experience, and Berry Interesting earned another satisfied client. If you’ve had an experience like Melissa’s before, don’t give up on your goal of having a beautiful, functional website and a development team that keeps your priorities top of mind.

The Rules of Life series website was built using the Divi Builder from Elegant Themes. If you’re curious about how Berry Interesting Productions can help your team build an outstanding website, we’re always happy to help! Drop us a line or book a consultation directly with our fearless leader, D’nelle. You can also sign up to get emails from Berry Interesting and we’ll keep you in the loop.

Igor Zielinski and Petra E. Schalk are a husband-wife team who own and operate Avicenna Acupuncture Clinic in the Wheat Ridge area of Denver, CO. Their original site, built in 2009 and maintained by Igor for 8 years, was written in HTML, using tables and internal CSS. Berry Interesting worked with Igor and Petra to revise their existing content and completely redesign the site using Divi Builder. The site now boasts true responsivity, is accessible across all devices, and is still maintained and updated by Igor.

Denver website redesign – conversion to a mobile-friendly WordPress site

What’s great about redesigning a site that already exists is that you can get to work without going through the content creation process first! Redesigns at any price point are some of our favorite projects; starting from scratch often results in “blank canvas paralysis”. Starting with an existing site means that there are already (whether the client knows it or not) weak points to address, clear problems to solve, and lots of opportunity for improvement.

Our approach to redesign for the Avicenna website

The original site had become somewhat of a frankenstein, as most sites do after about 3-5 years. We created a sitemap with the existing site content. From there, we reorganized the sitemap in such a way that took Avicenna’s business goals as well as the user experience into account. The existing content was fully repurposed during this build; however, we did swap out the old photography with more modern day stock images.

Keeping website redesign and maintenance affordable

We chose to use Divi Builder over a custom site design to keep the build affordable and keep the ongoing management as low-friction as possible. We’ve been using Divi on a number of sites this year specifically because of how pleased clients are during their individualized client training sessions.(Seriously – we’ve never seen clients so instantly happy editing the site via the WordPress Dashboard with Divi sitting on top of it!) While we don’t think Divi is appropriate for every website build we encounter, in a situation like Avicenna’s it was the right choice. Not only did it make the build a breeze, but it enables Igor and Petra to make changes to the site design, add new pages, and update/edit content without having to dive into PHP or load the site down with a ton of plugins.

Additionally, because of Igor and Petra’s skill levels, building on WordPress was a breeze. For clients who are committed to managing their own sites, it only takes a little bit of training to fully prepare them for 90% of what needs to be done to keep a WordPress site running smoothly. Igor and Petra are fully capable of handling the week-to-week maintenance that WordPress demands – and should anything ever go sideways they know they can reach out to Berry Interesting for help. (For clients that aren’t quite so experienced, or who have too much to do already, we offer WordPress Support Plans.)

Improving website user experience across devices

The other upside to Divi is that the visual builder is super easy to use in order to optimize pages for any device. Out of the box, we were already ahead of the game because Divi is built to present nicely on any device – older smartphones all the way up to big external displays. Divi’s tools let us put our brain power to work on improving how the user interacts with the site instead of spending time time figuring out the user experience based on device breakpoints and screen sizes. Buttons are easily clickable, no matter what device is being used to access the site, and content that’s irrelevant to smartphone users can be hidden with the click of a button. This functionality is easy for Igor and Petra to use when they create new pages, so the ongoing user interaction and experience will be consistent.

Additionally, thanks to WordPress’s out-of-the-box SEO-friendliness and the Yoast SEO plugin, we were able to quickly set up the site in such a way that it dovetails neatly with the off-site SEO efforts. Avicenna partners with Brian Duggan at Vivial for off-site SEO, working to drive leads on their behalf. Berry Interesting picks up where the off-site SEO work leaves off. We created a site that is professional and easy to access across all devices whenever a user makes their way to the site.

Building a website for future growth

Running a website on WordPress means that future growth – no matter what shape it takes – is easy to accommodate on your website. For Igor and Petra, the growth of their practice may mean they need better solutions for scheduling, hiring, selling herbs or advertising on-site events. Their site is now ready to easily accommodate the addition of functionality like online scheduling, posting job openings, selling herbs online, or adding an event calendar with registration capabilities. These things can be accomplished via plugins that already exist out there in the WordPress ecosystem, or they can be custom built, depending on what Avicenna needs.

Services provided via this project: sitemapping, user experience optimization, theme customization, WordPress development, lead generation optimization, onsite SEO

Before & After website redesign gallery