Sabrina Dent: Freelance web designer, developer and internet marketer living in Cork, Ireland with one dog and a husband in no particular order.
Site Launch: Clickcase.ie
Clickcase is one of many sites that have gone live in the last year that I have not had time to blog or add to my portfolio, but it’s one of my two favourites so I thought I’d portfolio it up. Plus, they are selling awesome accessories for iPads and iPhones right here in Ireland, and you may want to bundle some under your yule tree!
I’ll be honest and say that this project was hard going. The client brief was pretty liquid, and we started from scratch in terms of name, logo and design. That can end in one of two ways: creative bliss or Shakespearean tragedy. Luckily, after 15 years of doing this, I have a pretty high batting average and get it right first go more than 98% of the time. But the first design we did for the site just didn’t come together in a way you could really hang a brand on, so Katherine and I threw it out and started over. And by “threw it out” I mean threw out the whole thing – logo, design and build. The whole thing.
Happily, it’s a bit like childbirth in that it can feel like it will never end when you’re going through it, but then it’s all over, you’re mightily pleased with the results, and it all seems worth it. Both Katherine and I and the client love the site, which features all the usual ecommerce suspects plus agile product tagging, snazzy product images, inline product question forms and lots of really nice features all over. WordPress is silently integrated to provide more robust content management for non-product pages than our cart offers out of the box. There’s also a swanky Facebook page to go with.
In an interesting sidenote, after choosing and registering the clickcase.ie domain, we were able to score the already-owned clickcase.com domain for an unprecedented $60. I have picked up aftermarket domains for clients from $250 – $750 (I won’t spend more) but getting your .com for $60 has to be the bargain of the century.
Finally, after 30 years of rejecting Apple products, I have been seduced by the kitchen potential of the Speck Handyshell and would dearly like one for Christmas. And an iPad to go with it…
(PS: Yes, yes they do have Dodo Cases. You Apple people are so pervy.)
24 Nov 2011
| In: Portfolio | Tags:branding, css, Design, development, ecommerce, logo, wordpress
So basically you threw away the first baby?!?
24.11.2011, 12:56 pm (subscribed to comments)THE WHOLE THING. It was pretty painful but totally the right move!
Nice job – you can tell it’s been hard going because it looks so simple!
Did you have to commission all the product photography – or was that provided by client? I imagine that was fairly painful.
24.11.2011, 2:49 pmThe product photos THANKFULLY come from the various manufacturers and are used under explicit license, so that’s vastly less painful than having to shoot them all. I did a couple and all the rest are chosen and uploaded by the Clickcase folks, since all the ecommerce sites we build are self serve. I don’t want to enter all those products!
I’m glad you like it and *really* glad you think it’s simple – yup, that’s the job well done :D
I’m loving your work. I am by far a horrible designer, I can’t design a website to save my life, but I love seeing good designs. I found your site while browsing a friend’s site — named Paul, won’t name the site since it’s not entirely finished.
One thing I figured I’d point out is the link “swanky Facebook page” is broken. It’s missing the http:// in the HTML code.
Now to browse a bit more.
01.12.2011, 11:52 pmBrilliant site Sabrina. Clean and cool.
06.05.2012, 10:33 am