The Vintage Iron Website and my Hiatus

    As good fortune would have it I acquired a job as a web developer with the furniture company Vintage Iron shortly after my first blog post. However this did lead to my ignoring of both my portfolio and blog for the amount of time it took me to design and launch the website. I've gained an immense amount of experience from this project but my role in the company is not limited to development, I also contribute to the social media management of the brand. Working with Jesse and Adam at Vintage Iron has been quite the experience and privilege. I intend on continuing my work with Vintage Iron but I also intend to continue my upkeep of my blog and portfolio.

Working on The Vintage Iron Site

    Today I want to talk about the reasoning behind two design decisions I made for this site: the captions on the image tiles and the size of the landing page. Both decisions were influenced by our target audience of furniture wholesalers. My employer, Jesse, was concerned about our clientele being able to use our website from the beginning of development. His concern stemmed from the fact that many of our current customers are of an age range between late 40's and mid/late 50's. An age range not necessarily known for being tech savvy.
    The first issue that he brought to my attention was the lack of direction on our landing page. Initially, the close up of our lamp (the above image) was supposed to take up the entirety of the page with the image links found below. Jesse asked, how would anyone know to look down for more content.
The solution was to reduce the height of the landing image and decrease the distance between that image and the page's content. The effect being that the bottom of the page now shows the tops of the image tiles leading the user to scroll down.

The second item of concern to Jesse were the tiles on our main page. Initially these image links had the captions appear as a mouse hover event similar to these examples. But Jesse made the point that our audience would benefit from better defining what these images on the page were/did.

The solution was to have the captions on the images at all times; labeling the image links with the pages they would link to. For the purpose of better visibility I also had the caption background darken to better bring forward the link text.