Aspen Center for Cosmetic Medicine

Project Description

I worked with two great women on this project: my one-time student and content strategist Elizabeth Nix, who referred me the job, and designer Danielle Avila from Hip Citizen Creative, who is also responsible for the design on Kia Miller’s website.

Aspen Center for Cosmetic Medicine seriously needed a website redesign. Not only was their existing site (which I somehow failed to take a screenshot of) not mobile-friendly, it was actually broken, or at least, full of broken images. The website was completely at odds with the company’s brand. Plus, they were unhappy with their shared hosting at GoDaddy (what a surprise) and also with their Go Daddy email.

Danielle created a new identity package for them as well as designing the site, and Elizabeth developed some much-improved website copy. We decided to use the new (at that time) Swank theme as the basis for the design, and did not add much to it besides custom page headers and one additional page template.

Most of the work building this site was a matter of simplifying. We did not use all of the available home page widget areas, or indeed the primary sidebar or footer widgets.

The Swank demo site home page looks like this:

The new home page for Aspen Center for Cosmetic Medicine looks like this:

As you can see, I made a few tweaks to the CSS: squares underneath the menu items instead of dividing lines between them, dividing lines between the home featured widgets, and new fonts.

I added a few extra classes in order to be able to display the Contact page the way the client wanted it. Because they didn’t want the regular page title on this page, I also installed Genesis Title Toggle.

The layout of the About Us page required the addition of some code to functions.php in order to display the featured image to the left of the content.

Probably the most difficult part of the project (though some of the CSS was fussy) was the email migration. First I had to actually activate IMAP email in GoDaddy, then set up a sync between the old GoDaddy email server and the new SiteGround email server. Because SiteGround only provides 1 GB of space per mailbox, we only transferred messages from the past year. It was time-consuming but went pretty smoothly.