Timber Woodcraft, LLC

Timber Woodcraft is a local business here in Louisville, KY that hired me to redesign their e-commerce/portfolio website.

I was approached by the owner of Timber Woodcraft to look at their website and offer some critique and advice on how to increase the usability of his site.

After submitting my feedback, he hired me to redesign the layout and content of his site. All of the changes took place within their existing brand.

To begin, I conducted a heuristic evaluation of the usability of his website and sent him over some screenshots of my recommendations.

By completing user journeys, I was able to uncover some major problems with the primary user flows and information architecture. I noted these as I pressed more into the purpose of the website. 

Through multiple meetings and conversations, I was able to uncover the reasons he believed he needed a website so that we could properly align his business goals with his technological solutions. From this we were able to uncover the business goals of his website:

-Primarily, this site needs to direct customers to custom orders. His primary money-earner is custom work. Further, increasing custom orders aligns with his career goals. 

- Secondarily, make sales on his stocked wood pieces.

After I had identified some key usability problems, I started sketching design solutions for the owner to evaluate, modify, and approve (sketches not included due to the quantity). In our discussions, we came to the conclusion that this site needs to primarily be a portfolio, and secondarily needs to be an e-commerce site.

From the sketches that we resounded with the most, I converted them to wireframes.

Instead of turning those wireframes into high fidelity mockups and then implementing the mocks, I did full fidelity in implementation using Wix.

I was able to utilize existing photos the owner had taken recently instead of organizing a photoshoot.

It always feels good to have technology align with actual goals and in this redesign we accomplished that.
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Personally, I found Wix to be very clunky to use. It was difficult to get things to align to a grid in implementation- a lot of math was involved.

Further, this experience helped me gain design wisdom. Since we didn't make any changes to the branding, I learned that not everything needs to be changed for great improvements to be made.