Context

Esther has a degree in Tourism worked for several years for different hotels. At one point, she started working in the events industry within the business tourism sector. After a while, she decided to start her own brand, Essential MICE, a consulting firm that focuses on business tourism and events. She contacted me because she needed a website to present her services.

By the way, in case you’re wondering, MICE stands for Meetings, Incentives, Conferences & Exhibitions.

Proposed Solution

Esther had a very clear idea from the start of what her website should be like. She knew what she liked and didn’t like, and how it had to be structured.

In particular, some key points were:

• Inviting but sophisticated look
• Texts would, in general, be short
• Simple structure

She provided me some hand-made wireframes (or drafts) of how she wanted each section to look like, and she also sent a colour palette which I then worked into the website. I created the designs using WordPress and customising them with CSS code where necessary. I also chose the typographies, adjusted their sizes and chose the colours from the palette provided by her.

Although the final result may look simple, it isn’t. The design was custom-made, and it had to be tweaked to work properly in mobile screens (tablets and smartphones). You can read more about the technical challenges below.

Technical Challenges

This project offered several challenges:

• Esther wanted each section to occupy 100% of the viewport (that is, the whole height of the screen). This requires finding the right balance between content and blank spaces, and ensuring that it looks right in different devices.
• She also wanted a grid showing listing her services. Although it looks simple, I had to put in a lot of work in order to get a grid that:
  • Fills 100% of the height of the screen
  • Looks right and can be readable in smaller screens
  • Stacks correctly in mobile devices, with images and service titles showing in the right order
• As the website wasn’t content-heavy, we chose to go with a one-page implementation. This created its own challenges, as some contents required their own page (e.g. cookies policy, legal notice, etc.) and this created issues with the menu.
• I tried different implementations of the service descriptions (the service names in the grid are clickable), and in the end we went with a pop-up like solution.
  • The main reason behind this is that Esther wanted each service description to fill the screen. A pop-up is a nice way to do so, that makes sense in the context of websites. On the other hand, if service descriptions were placed in a single page, one after the other, the reader could get the impression that there was no more content to be read, specially in bigger screens or those with higher resolutions.
  • As a bonus, this implementation also solved a technical issue that had to do with automatic scrolling.

Benefits

Esther’s main goal was to have a website for her newly-created business, which she could use to introduce herself and her services to her potential clients. She also wanted to be able to easily change the texts or images if she needed to.

Although these are the main benefits, the website also:

• Complies with the GDPR
• It is backed up regularly to a remote server, so that in the event that something goes very wrong, the data can be recovered.
• Contact forms can sometimes stop working if the server blocks the sending of e-mails. In order to avoid any issues, the website stores any sent forms so that they are never lost.

The post Essential MICE appeared first on Dandelium Studio.

Context

Samuel has been teaching Spanish for over 15 years. He has various sources of income – private students, a language school (Instituto Cervantes) and a university’s language school, among others. When COVID struck, he moved to online teaching – an experience which proved to be very successful. This sparked his desire to establish an online presence and create his own brand. One of this goals is to help other teachers of Spanish understand the nuances of the language and give them tips and strategies to deal with certain topics in class.

Website

Gramatices

Proposed Solution

After debating and analysing different options, Samuel decided to create a membership website where he can offer courses, teaching materials and other resources to teachers of Spanish. His membership is mainly based on direct interaction with its members. Almost every week there is either a Q&A session, a tutorial or a lesson on a certain topic. The website uses the same design as Palomitas de matiz and Samuel Rísquez, with a different logo. This is done on purpose, to create consistency between the different brands and unify them.

Results

The main benefits are the following:

The post Gramatices appeared first on Dandelium Studio.

Businesses, like people, change and evolve over time. As of today (January 2024), this website is no longer available. In September 2023, Samuel decided to unify his different brands (Gramatices, Palomitas de matiz, and Samuel Rísquez) into one. This reduces maintenance costs, not only financially, but also in time and mental effort. Currently, only Gramatices is in operation.

Context

This is a sister project to Palomitas de matiz and Gramatices. Samuel has been teaching Spanish for over 15 years. He has various sources of income – private students, a language school (Instituto Cervantes) and a university’s language school, among others. When COVID struck, he moved to online teaching – an experience which proved to be very successful. This sparked his desire to establish an online presence and create his own brand. He decided to use two different brands – one caters to students of Spanish and the other to teachers of this same language. Samuel Rísquez is the brand that targets teachers.

Proposed Solution

After debating and analysing different options, Samuel decided to create two different brands: one for students and the other for teachers. The website uses the same design as Palomitas de matiz, with a different logo. This is done on purpose, to create consistency between the different brands and unify them.

Unlike Palomitas de matiz, Samuel Rísquez is mainly used to promote free webinars and Samuel’s membership for teachers, called Gramatices. At the time of writing (October 2022) it doesn’t include a blog, but may do so in the future.

Results

The main benefits are the following:

The post Samuel Rísquez appeared first on Dandelium Studio.

Businesses, like people, change and evolve over time. As of today (January 2024), this website is no longer available. In September 2023, Samuel decided to unify his different brands (Gramatices, Palomitas de matiz, and Samuel Rísquez) into one. This reduces maintenance costs, not only financially, but also in time and mental effort. Currently, only Gramatices is in operation.

Context

Samuel has been teaching Spanish for over 15 years. He has various sources of income – private students, a language school (Instituto Cervantes) and a university’s language school, among others. When COVID struck, he moved to online teaching – an experience which proved to be very successful. This sparked his desire to establish an online presence and create his own brand, in order to find students and help them learn Spanish. His ultimate goal is to create an online membership where students will be able to attend live webinars and learn from prerecorded material and courses.

Proposed Solution

After talking about his goals and analysing different options, we came up with the following solution, divided into two main stages: creating a standard website with a blog, and creating the academy/membership website.

First Stage: Creation of a standard website with a blog

Second Stage: Creation of the membership website

In the summer of 2022, this stage was put on hold, as Samuel decided to create a membership for teachers, instead of students. For more details of this project, you can check the Gramatices portfolio page.

Membership

This will be installed in a subdomain (such as https://academy.palomitasdematiz.com), so in all effects it will be a different website. We decided to separate them so that the websites can operate independently from each other, making it easier to deal with issues if they ever occur. It also means that each website contains only the required plugins and not more. For example, in this case, the translation plugin is not necessary, but in contrast to the “main” website, it requires a plugin to create the courses and their content.

Results

At the time of writing (Summer 2022), the main benefits are the following:

The post Palomitas de matiz appeared first on Dandelium Studio.

Context

This is a very special project, which I created way before Dandelium Studio existed or was even in my thoughts.

After getting a dog in 2016, I decided I wanted to create a website to talk about life with a German Shepherd, and cover a variety of topics: healthcare, food, activities, books and so on. Unlike Dandelium Studio, in this case I never considered creating a multilingual website. I decided to write in English as I thought it would reach more people.

P.S: About the photo – this is not my dog, but I love the picture (although the puppy was a bit stressed, see the tongue flick), and it is more or less from back then.

Proposed Solution

As usual, I used WordPress to create the website. I had worked on other projects in the past that used it, and I really liked it. In order to cover my needs, a blog with the ability to show the Instagram and Twitter feeds was enough. The categories and tags, already built into WordPress, would help organize the information into the different topics. It featured a magazine-like theme with the ability to show sticky posts at the top of the page, and used a couple of plugins to display the feeds.

Results

I ran the website for a couple of years. During that time, I was able to achieve my goals, which were to publish dog-related information and integrate the content with social media. After a year I moved the website to a different server – this taught me the process of moving a site. After two years, when writing posts stopped being fun and became a chore, I decided to close down the website.

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