Web Archives - Dawn Barnhart

Salon Botanical

July 12, 2019 by Dawn Barnhart

Time Frame:

May — July 2019

Team:

Dawn Barnhart – UX, UI, Visual Design, WordPress Build
Laura Frederiksen – Owner / Stakeholder
Custom Development – JSWeb.solutions

Tools:

Description:

Salon Botanical is a high-end hair salon in the Dilworth neighborhood of Charlotte, NC. The new owner, who has worked at this salon for many years, bought it from the previous owner in 2017. The former owner had never developed a site or any digital marketing to promote the business. The first task was to develop new and updated branding for the business that reflected the caliber of the staff, the level of service, the modern, upscale and lush feel of the salon and its product line as well as the new owners personality. This branding was applied to all indoor and outdoor signage and business collateral. The next phase was to design and develop an online presence for the salon that also reflected and promoted the staff, their skills and to provide an avenue for online marketing and promotion.

Previous Logo

Challenge:

Create a simple to use and updated site for very non-technical staff. Provide information on the staff, the services offered and the product line. Additional information on the salon, its location and contact information is also included.

Solution:

Working closely with the owner the site was designed and developed to adhere to the new branding and site objectives. The look and feel needed to continue the lush, botanical feel of the brand. A professional photographer was hired and consulted with to shoot the salon and staff visuals. These were all incorporated into the site’s specific pages.

As part of the site backend, an internal WYSIWYG was also built-in so non-technical staff would be able to easily update, add or re-arrange content of any type.

Outcome:

Salon Botanicals site was launched in July of 2019. The design and ease of use have been very well received.

Wireframes

VISIT SITE

Gardening Know How: UI / UX Redesign

May 22, 2019 by Dawn Barnhart

Description: Gardening Know How is one of the largest gardening websites in the world, with database of over 10,000 original gardening articles written by practicing gardeners. Company leadership’s goal is to update and refresh the site UI, make the site user experience easier, increase page views as well as surface content more clearly.
Roles: UI design, UX
Firm: Trefoil Tech
Time Frame: May 2019

Equus Software

April 21, 2018 by Dawn Barnhart

Equus Software Web Site Redesign

Time Frame:

2018 – Present

Team:

Dawn Barnhart – UX, UI, Visual Design
Mandy Hawkes – Marketing Director / Stakeholder
Copywriting – John Riley Associates
Custom Development – John Russell

Tools:

Description:

Equus Software Corporate Web Site: 2013-2018

The site as it was when I joined the company was a very rigid, template-based setup on a proprietary platform. The marketing staff could only edit the carousel on the home page, add blog posts and job postings. Every instance of other changes required sending work orders to the agency that had designed and built the site. This was excessively costly as there were many rounds of edits each for each request to ensure what the marketing staff wanted was accomplished. Even adding a landing page required the agencys’ assistance. The marketing staff was eager to add Hubspot to the site to gain a more in-depth understanding of sales opportunities and to implement a CRM system. The quoted cost to add this to the site was excessive, as well.

Challenge:

The site was very hard to use; required a lot of searching for content and hid a lot of information in obscure ways. The site suffered from an SEO standpoint, as well. Its overall design had also not aged well.

Solution:

I offered to redesign and rebuild the site to achieve the business needs more fully. I sourced several persons for the hire of a copywriter as the company needed to re-visit the content for updating purposes, wanted to add additional content, images, graphics, and video. I worked with the copywriter and began re-architecting the site in parallel. After a few iterations, the company leadership, marketing director and I finalized the architecture. I began working on the wires for the page layouts—adjusting as required.

As part of the new site backend, an internal WYSIWYG was also built-in so non-technical marketing staff would be able to easily update, add or re-arrange content of any type.

Outcome:

The site was launched in July of 2018. The internal system has been very well received—the new external design has as well. The time spent on updating the site for conferences, new content, updating or adding videos has been cut from weeks to hours. The cost of the new hosting and maintenance is a fraction of the previous site.

Hubspot has been implemented and can be tweaked, pages can be added, styled and new content can easily be added as needed.