Tag Archives: projBflWeb

BooksForLuke – Web Site

BflLogo

Summary

This site is more of a landing page than an actual site. The purpose of this page was to give people an easy way to contact us to donate books or find out more about what we are doing.

Banner Design

Since the site is just one page, I figured if I got help with a decent banner, I could put together the rest of the site. I created a project on 48HoursLogos asking for help with designing the banner. Here is the initial page I created to help the designers see how simple this site really was. (The original name was TammyBook.com). I was only asking them for something to replace the TammyBook.com banner at the top.
TammyBook_com
Here are some of the submissions I received.
Img07
Img06
Img05
Img04
I like them all and they each have their strengths. However, when I saw the last one with the children, I was hooked.  I had thought about a building block to convey the idea that this site is about children.  I worked with the designer, and he came up with the next version.

Img03
This is closer, but the block didn’t look like the classic building block I was thinking of. I found a picture on Google and uploaded it for him to see what I was thinking.

This was the final contest winner. He added the “lines” in the block and produced this.
Good design to me is like obscenity. I may not be able to describe it, but I know it when I see it. This one just worked for me.
Img02

With his banner, the site currently looked like this. I thought it looked pretty good. The font used is Kristen ITC. It is intended to be a “child” font and considering the site, seemed right to me. Here is what the site looked like with the new banner.

BflWeb01

Since my designer had raised the bar of how the site should look, I asked if he would suggest any other changes on the site. He came up with this.

BooksForLuke_140219a

I was “nearly” convinced. I liked the the new site. My only concern was that it may look a little “too polished” and we might lose the personal connection with the visitors. I submitted the two versions in a FeedBack Army project to get some feedback from other people. To my surprise, some people actually preferred the first site, but the majority liked the new site.

Amazon Email

When a visitor fills out the form on the site, we receive an email Using the Amazon SES SMTP Interface.

Technology

  • Asp.Net MVC, C#, Razor
  • Amazon SES SMTP