Reflective coaching
Reflective Coaching is based in Longmont, CO but the busienss has clients all over the world. The business provides a results-oriented and client-focused inquiry process. It gives clients total freedom in which to explore their unique needs and truth without any outside influence. Reflective Coaching helps clients evaluate and draw important conclusions, which empower them to make more discerning choices about how to wisely proceed in work and life.
01. Approach
This was a challenging project and helped me to make adjustments in how I work with clients as I try and become more transparent and straightforward with my offerings. The project was fairly wide open and originally it had no logo or other photo assets. After a brief initial consultation I forwarded Charuta the owner of Reflective Coaching to a designer friend to help her create her logo. This is the foundation for the web design and helps with color choices. Charuta had never been through this process and my normal process didn't work as it had in the past. After we had gone through the original mockup phase we put the project on hold and she hired a designer to help choose all of the fonts and help with the exact layout she was looking for moving forward. I received a detailed word document on the changes necessary and we restarted the project. This guidance allowed me to focus strictly on developing the site as the design decisions had already been made. Additional challenges were that the design was layed out but didn't take into account the responsive nature of a website so we had to work through some of these deviations.
02. Design
After I received the logo from the first designer and the documentation from the second designer I could see the vision that Charuta wanted for this project. Charuta was very particular about what she liked and what she didn't, however she didn't know what she wanted from the beginning of the project. It took several iterations with the second designer to get the color scheme font pairings and layout just as she had wanted. In the end they settled on a gorgeous color palette of blue, orange and black that really came together nicely. The main two fonts were Arima Madura and Interstate which were a pairing I had never seen together but look fantastic. The Arima Madura is a script font used for headings but it was readable and bold to give the site some nice flair.
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Interstate
03. Technology
The Reflective Coaching project is a totally responsive design based on CSS Grid Layout with a Flexbox fallback. That means the project is not reliant on an outside library of code like Bootstrap to be fully responsive. The starting point was HTML5 Boilerplate to make sure the project was utilizing current best practices and most browser based styling was reset using Normalize.css. We don't utilize templates so all coding was done by hand using the Brackets code editor. Charuta and her team is also able to add blog articles, maintain the verbiage and images on the site by utlizing Perch as the content management system. Every page in the project was validated and confirmed to be W3C compliant. All css files are modular in nature so Gulp was used to combine and condense all CSS files in the final project build in order to make the page load speed better. The final page load speed is a ridiculously fast 1 - 1.3 seconds seconds per page and a page speed indes ranking in the top 10% of all websites on the Interwebz. CSS and javascript animation was created by using the following libraries Animate.css, Hover.css, & T-scroll. Other code and libraries used include Modernizr, jQuery, Akismet, Cloudflare CDN, Vanilla Lazy Load and Google Analytics. Software utilized to create this project included Brackets, Photoshop, Perch CMS, VectorMagic.com and CompressPNG.com.
The coding and software skills used by Colorado SEO Design to make this project take off included:
- Photoshop
- PHP
- HTML5
- CSS3
- Javascript
- JSON
- Schema.org markup
