This post is by our intern Sharayah Sanders.

Usually, when a client comes to us, they have an outdated website, and want a fresh look.  Holeman landscape presented a very different web design challenge.

When Holeman Landscape came to us, they had a site they loved but couldn’t update on their own very easily. What they wanted was help making their site functional and useful.  As we reviewed the web site design, we realized the problem stemmed from the fact that their site was built with Flash making it unfriendly for SEO,  invisible on smart phones, and difficult to edit. In addition it can take a long time load for some users with slower connections.

We introduced them to the WordPress platform and showed them how easy it would be maintain their site. We also showed them some new designs using Elegant themes we thought would really showcase their landscaping portfolio. They decided they loved their existing  design  but wanted to have the usability of WordPress. So my challenge was to turn their old Flash site into a theme for WordPress.

For most of the last year at Roundpeg, I’ve  worked mostly on graphic design projects as I continue to work on my degree in New Media at IUPUI. This past summer, Lorraine has been allowing me to use some of my programming skills, giving me more WordPress projects, mostly small fixes and tweeks to websites. The Holeman Landscape website was the  first WordPress site  I would be designing on my own.

I started the design with Artisteer which I used to build the foundation and major files which support the WordPress theme.  After that, I continued to customize directly into the code, which is a more familiar environment for me. I was able to find my way around the theme pretty well and make changes as they needed to be made and customize it so that the site would look as close to the old Flash site as possible. In the end, I think we came pretty close to giving the client the same look  with expanded functionality. They are very satisfied with the final project.

In school, we build meaningless site after meaningless site. I like being able to see my hard work out there on the web and to know that the client is happy with it as well.

 Sharayah is part of the design team at Roundpeg, an Indianapolis web design and social media firm