Where Shery was starting from
Shery sells vintage and coastal prints from her home studio in Terrigal on the NSW Central Coast, and frames each one to order.
She'd already had a website job with another developer. Plenty of meetings, she told me, and still nothing to look at. Even sending photos was a chore. So when she filled in my form, what she needed was something she could open on her phone and react to.
She had more to work with than she realised. A Google profile with five stars, a Facebook page, an Instagram full of prints, and an older site on her .com.au with nine collections, only one of them with real photos.
I built before I asked her anything
Her form was short, so I didn't book a call. I went through what was already public: her Google listing, Facebook, Instagram, the old site and her reviews. Her Facebook page called the shop eclectic, vintage and quirky, so I started from those words.
That evening I sent her two homepages. One was soft and pastel. The other was built around the aubergine and gold of her old Facebook logo. Both let you pull open drawers to browse prints by theme, and change the wall colour, the frame and the mat to see how a print looks on a wall.
It's a lot easier to react to a page than to describe one. That's the idea behind giving you the homepage first.
The five days
| Day | What happened |
|---|---|
| Day 1 (Sunday night) | Shery fills in the form. Two homepages are in her inbox before she goes to bed. |
| Day 2 | She picks the pastel one. She sends her real logo, a pink wordmark on dark green, and I swap it in and retune the colours to match. One wording change: "quirky" comes out, because she sees the shop as vintage and coastal. That was the whole round of changes. |
| Days 3 to 5 | I build the other four pages (gallery, process, about and contact) and set up her hosting. |
| Day 5 | The site goes live at thatlittleframingplace.com.au. |
Five days from her form to a live site. About three of those were building. The rest was waiting on her logo and her hosting details.
Why it's on her hosting
Shery already had hosting paid for, so I built the site to run on it. I can work with whatever hosting you already have, so you don't pay for anything twice.
Her domains stay where they are, and stay hers. If you'd rather move to something simpler later, I can do that for free.
Her old site wasn't deleted. I archived it on the server and kept a copy of my own, in case she wants anything back.
What I left out
No online shop. Every print is made to order, so people enquire and Shery replies. The enquiry form has a spam check so it doesn't fill up with junk.
The frame colours and mat sizes in the try-it-on section are there for fun. I haven't listed a price range or sizes she hasn't given me. If I don't know something, it stays off the page until you tell me.
Five pages is the whole job: Home, Gallery, Process, About and Contact. If you need a shop or bookings, I'll say so up front.
What Shery said
The look was right on the first go. She picked a design and the only changes were her logo and one word. Her Google review reads: "Totally gave me best layout and design for small framing business." You can read it on Google.
The live site is here. Open it on your phone and try the frame finishes on the Process page.
If you've been through this before
If a developer has had you in meetings for weeks and you still have nothing to look at, you should expect better. You should be able to see your homepage before you agree to anything, and your photos should be easy to send.
That's how I start every job. Already paid for hosting or a domain? Say so and I'll build around it. My what to have ready guide covers the rest, and the price is on one page.