Carrie Hughes is an independent speech and language therapist working with children and adults in Essex. She wanted an e-commerce web site that was easy to self-run and update her self. Using a WordPress template as a starting point I created a modern, clean looking site with all the extras to help her market herself. Web design and marketing aren’t my main strengths but I’m always looking for challenges and new skills to learn. 

Projects like this give me a chance to practice and discover new skills. I really enjoyed working on the back end of WordPress and researching SEO, MailChimp, WooCommerce, Google analytics, site transfers etc. It also helped me design this site and put measures in so I can start getting out there more and get my site seen. 

For the branding of the site, I kept it as clean as possible with a calm pastel colour palette. I arranged a photo shoot with three of carries clients which were really fun. Photography has always been a hobby of mine and I’ve taken a Lynda.com course to improve my technical abilities. The photos were taken on my Fuji xe-1 with a vintage 50mm manual lens which gives photos a really cool style. Getting to practise my hobby on jobs like this makes the job a lot more fun. I work with photographers a lot whether it be at exhibitions or in studios for campaigns such as the Reflect project. I’m always interested in picking up tips and tricks that will improve my work. 

Overall I’m really pleased with the results and I’m looking forward to working on this project in the future. We have newsletters and social media campaigns set up and we’re collecting data so we can see what marketing is working to get the best results. Small projects like this that I can take charge of all on my own and have an overview of everything from web development to marketing gives me a better understanding of other jobs. This helps me work better as a designer and improve as a strategist on projects and develop a more streamline way of working on projects.