Richard Westenra

Project Background

Black Swan Designs is run by Mel Blowes, a crafty entrepreneur, professional photographer and graphic designer living in Christchurch. She is involved in the Christchurch arts and crafts scene and has won various awards for her work, most recently winning the Supreme Award for the window display competition at the 2009 Ellerslie International Flower Show.

Black Swan Designs had a previously existing website (see image below), however Mel felt that the old site no longer accurately reflects the current state of her business, and was keen for a fresh look. She also had three separate web presences – her original website, her blogspot blog, and her online shops – and wanted them all put in one location. Being a graphic designer by trade, Mel was able to handle the design work. My role involved advising Mel about the web-specific aspects of design, turning the design into a working site, and also coming up with some funky javascript effects.

Site Description

The new Black Swan Designs website is a PHP brochure website featuring:
• Fully-integrated WordPress blog
• Image galleries featuring ‘Slimbox’ image viewer and slideshows
• Auto-updating array-based navigation system with a slick Mootools motion effect
• Bespoke Content Management System (CMS) with administrator access to edit site text and admin user accounts.
• Integrated Etsy online shop listings via XML/RSS feed
• Contact form

The new Black Swan Designs website includes many photo galleries featuring images of past and current products and services, as well as information about the business, her online shop listings, and contact information.

The new site also features prominent links to her two online craft stores at Felt and Etsy, plus a live display of her current Etsy listings which is integrated into the shop page with PHP thanks to Etsy’s RSS/XML feed. The new Black Swan Blog runs on WordPress, and we were able to import her old Blogspot posts using WordPress’s import function.

Testimonial

‘Richard was great to work with, preempting my requests on several occasions and constructing a functioning site that was 100% faithful to my original design. I enjoyed the informative emails with relevant links which made me feel a real part of the process, and look forward to working together again in the future.’ – Mel Blowes

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Project Background

Westenra Corporate Travel is my parents’ travel business. They handle the organization and planning of overseas travel for corporate clients. I designed and built this website to fulfil the criteria of the server-side project at Natcoll.

Site Description

Because my parents had no established logo or branding, the website required the creation of a professional identity and colour-scheme. Logo design is not normally part of my services, but I am very happy with the end result. As part of the final customer documentation, I made several versions of the logo for use in stationery and letterheads.

The site content includes information about the business, travel tools, links and advice. There is also a contact form provided for any queries featuring a reCAPTCHA Turing test.

The custom-made admin area features the ability to edit most site text, and to add, edit and delete users and their details. Feel free to check out the back end, by clicking on the link in the top right of the screen (above the map of New Zealand). The username and password are both ‘guest’. Don’t worry about breaking anything, guest users have no editing privileges so any changes you make will not be saved.

Note: Whilst the design and development of this site is completely finished, my parents haven’t yet gotten around to editing the content, so the About and Travel Tools pages feature some placeholder text.

Testimonial

‘Richard, you understood the brief well and created a funky and easy site which exceeded our expectations. The style is contemporary, easy to navigate and use, and best of all has attracted business which is what it is all about!’ – Jeremy Westenra

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