Designing the website has taken a lot of patience and time, after a few attempts I have finally settled on a layout and colour scheme. The website has been predominantly my responsibility to design, Elena did her own Hair portfolio so I have left that from this blog post.
After looking at literally hundreds of other Makeup Artists websites I decided the best option was to choose something clean and not too messy, When I imagine Kohl Face as a brand I see it as clean white and black, with straight edges and bold imagery. A lot of YouTuber's/Bloggers who work from home (Pixiwoo, Zoella etc.) have fun and girly layouts which I do think is a good idea for a blog as they are eye-catching , but I wanted to also convey the professional side of Kohl Face, we are a Freelance company as well as offering a blog and youtube channel so need to maintain a level of professionalism within our internet space.
I have learnt so much from designing this website, I now feel confident about keeping it updated and looking aesthetically pleasing.
Home Page
My favourite image so far for my portfolio is from the Baloons and tights photoshoot, It captures my makeup and Nail skills in one image. The photo was shot by a Third Year Fashion with Photography, she also did any editing required and I think the final outcome is beautiful, I have used it for a lot of our Display Images for social networking sites as I think it is our strongest image at the moment. I also decided to add a slideshow animation to the home page so that it would allow the viewer to see more of our best work before they even enter the site, hopefully this will pull them in to doing so.
I also decided to add a 'latest videos' section to the home page, so that people immediately know that youtube is part of our brand! I keep these updated and change them regularly to the latest uploads!
The Portfolios
I tried out quite a few different styles of portfolio, a slideshow, an accordion etc. but I felt this looked a bit messy as there as so many different images, keeping it in a grid format with thumbnails allows the viewer to scan over the images before selecting one to look at closer, it gives you an instant idea of what our style of work is. I have kept the layout the same for each separate portfolio and added individual links to each page in 2 different places; above the images and in a drop down from the menu, this allows navigation of the site to be clean and simple.
About Me
The about me section includes photographs of me and Elena doing our thing, this will allow potential clients to imagine themselves in the situation having their beauty desires fulfilled by us. Most professional makeup artists have a bio section written in the third person which is considered professional, whereas most youtuber's/bloggers are more informal and write in first person, I thought it was most appropriate to write ours in the first person also, although we are a professional company we also make informal videos and have a continuous online relationship with subscribers and clients meaning we need to convey our own personalities which is very difficult to do with a bio written in third person
Contact Page
The contact page is easy to read and contains every link to all the social media accounts I set up for Kohl Face, people can easily navigate their way around and find out the information they need in order to contact us, or to join us on our social platforms and become part of our own corner of the internet!
The Videos Page
The most work has gone in to the video page and videos, it takes hours and hours to film and edit and upload a video to YouTube and I wanted a page on the actual website that would be updated with each new video, I also decided to put the kohl face banner on this page too as it ties the whole aesthetics in together as well as matching it to the YouTube site.
The Blog
The blog was by far the most difficult page to construct, the first blog type provided by wix.com would only allow 1 picture per post, and being that most of our work is visual this was a bit ridiculous. I then had to create a separate blogger account and connect it to a page on our website, this was the only solution I could find for the problem but this lead to a lot of other confusion for me as hosting a website through another website is not easy, I had to take time checking the size of blog posts and images and making sure what I was posting on blogger was looking aesthetically pleasing over on our actual website, it took a while bot I got there in the end. The best way to navigate through the blog is to have each individual blog post displayed on a separate page, having multiple posts per page that were all different lengths lead to them being cut off in awkward places. But now you simply press the Next button to be taken back through all the previous posts. I also decided to use the same banner that I created on photoshop for our Youtube channel on the blog, it ties the whole thing in together.
Overall I am very happy with my final outcome, I think the website flows well and is aesthetically pleasing without being too overwhelming for the reader. I have linked all the Social media platforms together with the same imagery and aesthetics giving the brand Kohl Face its own individual look!
If I could go back and do anything differently, I would maybe try and be more adventurous with the layouts as I did see a lot of very individual styles of sites around where as I think Kohl Face is playing it quite safe, but personally that is how my brain likes to look at imagery, clean lines and not too fussy.
