Website. Graphic design. UX interactivity.
Over the course of my years working at CouchSeattle, I rebuilt their websites from scratch a number of times. As the company grew into a more high-end demographic, the website had to keep up with the brand. I was in charge of all the product photography, layout design, UX design, and SEO optimization for this website.
From laying out the shot to photo editing to uploading it to the website, each and every step of the photography process was lovingly handcrafted by me to let our clients understand examples of each of our styles and the extent of what we do. Each style is unique, and showing off the beauty of each is important to show clients the options available.
Couch indeed means Custom, and at CouchSeattle we were able to build any shape, any size, any fabric or leather, whatever the client has dreamed up. Our website had to reflect our unlimited options in a concise manner. I only have a moment to grab their interest, and it's hard to tell our clients all of our capabilities in that short amount of time. So with a clean layout, informative pages, and easy to read blurbs with a casual voice, I hope to spark our clients intrigue and bring them in for a consultation and sale.
To fill out the rest of the website or add some interest to otherwise boring pages, I also drew many icons and other supplemental diagrams to explain the different options available. This was most helpful on the “How to Order” page, which would otherwise just be text. Adding drawn icons helps describe the options in an abstract but easy to understand format.
When optimizing a website, it’s important to think about how it will look on a smartphone. According to our analytics, more than half of the visitors to this site are on mobile, and the majority of that are IOS users. Developing a website that looks good on both desktop and mobile can be tricky, but there are always ways to make it work.
One of the bottlenecks of this website was the photography. Oftentimes the client's sofas are going directly from Couch's factory to the client's home, so there's often not a moment to snap a photo. I took on the responsibility of holding photoshoots in our showroom to get clean, precise product photos for as many styles as I could get my hands on. These also involve photo editing any blemishes and color correcting all of the product shots. Many of our older styles we have not made in a few years, which has been a struggle to tie together the older, non-product shots with my newer way of capturing and cataloguing our styles.
I am continually updating the website as needed, so to see the most recent version and more layout examples, please visit the website at couchseattle.com.