Project Description
Ida's Beauty and Nails was created as part of my comunicating the company image course where we had to make a website to a company with WordPress and then carry out a campaign in social media. I was planning on making a website for my own company but always found myself thinking I don't have the time for it so I took the course just so I would have to finally make it.
Creating the site
I wanted a simple site that would have my portfolio, booking, price list and booking terms/conditions, home care instructions, and some info about me and where to find me. This was my second time using WordPress for making a website and it was a lot easier than in the first time around, maybe because I had a plan and a design of what I wanted and it made me fall in love with making websites.
Programming
We started with colors and a font for the company. I already used pink in my social media and my logo had different shades of pink so I just grabbed my logo and picked the colors from it. I also use pink in my nail room decor so pink is very present in my brand. Then I searched a few fonts I liked and eventually chose the one that looked best on the actual site.
Before I got to start making the site I needed to design the layout. I researced some of my colleagues' websites to see what I liked and what might work for my site. Part of the planning was to of course take into an account different screen sizes so I planned the layout for a mobile device too.
My Instagram feed is working as my portfolio and I wanted it to be at a visible place so I downloaded a social media plugin and added the feed on the main page. My booking is in another site but they do provide a widget that works with JavaScript so I followed their instructions for embedding the widget in the booking page. Rest of the pages are quite basic, but I do have Google Maps embedded as an iframe in the info page in case someone wants to have directions. And as normally, I did some minor changes to the CSS to improve responsiveness.
As a part of the assignment, we also had to do some search engine optimization and with the instructions from the teacher and a good SEO plugin, Yoast SEO, I'm proud to say that my optimization was successful and my website is the first site to appear in Google search results when searching for gel nails or nail extensions and first one in Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo when searching for gel nails in my city.
