My client, Houman, started United Contracting after 20 years of working for others.
This is a website design, development and hosting project for the new Burnaby company.
His business is new and needed a website. Houman also wanted someone who could handle every aspect of the website including photos, copy writing, hosting and maintenance.
The only thing I advised him to do is to buy his own domain, rather than letting a web developer do it for him. This is to ensure that he preserves control over his domain.
Here’s the process in which I undertook to design and brand his website.
Branding guidelines
Houman wanted a website that is clean and classy. So I made this presentation with my recommendations:
Copywriting
I also wrote the copy for United Contracting.
In order to do so, I had to fill in the lorem ipsums.
I scheduled a call with Houman on a Saturday and asked him a range of questions to help me understand his business. Here’s a screenshot of the Google Doc.
Web development
The website is a 100% static website that’s hosted on Netlify. You can view it here.
In order to create a static website, I coded this in NextJS which has a static site generator. I am thoroughly pleased with NextJS because it allowed me to write code in React. React fetches data from a locally hosted WordPress’s GraphQL endpoint.
I also used React Bootstrap as a CSS framework and FontAwesome for icons. Bootstrap really saved some time when it came to programming the navigation bar and the image carousel on the Projects page.
It has a contact form and is handled with Netlify Forms. I really like Netlify Forms because it reduces the amount of coding needed, although it was a little bit more work to integrate into React than into pure HTML.
Business card
As an additional service, I created complimentary business cards for United Contracting.
The business cards followed the website’s branding, colour scheme and fonts. This ensured consistency among all marketing materials.
