This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 13th, 2006 at 5:22 am and is filed under Designer Interviews, Web Templates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Attractive, functional and affordable - these are the big three reasons to pick a designer for any webpage. Webpage templates have a place in design, especialy Mambo and Joomla systems. One of my favorite websites is based on Mambo’s Template with CMS features - Contemporary Art Gallery. There are a lot of great webpages in the portfolio of designer Joanne Glasspoole - one of my favorites there is Way Cool Cooking School.
Joanne has two websites, both display parts of her portfolio - Glasspoole.com and Indigo Creative Solutions . They are all attractive, functional and affordable. When I contacted Joanne about her websites I requested an interview to which she responded.
How did you get into web design? “In my previous profession, I was an executive assistant. When I went to work for the president of a small CPA firm, he asked me to develop a web site and an Intranet site for his company. That was in 1999. I took three HTML classes and started building my first web site. Web design became a passion. When our clients started asking my boss to help them build their web sites, my boss hired an assistant for me and I started to do web design full-time.”
Do you remember the very first site you designed? “It was for a small CPA firm called Brown and Company.”
You also do SEO and web developement, you offer an array of services? “I started my own web design company in 2003. I currently have more than 75 active clients. We do both web development and search engine marketing.”
Where do you get your art for these webpages? “It depends. Some of our clients select premade templates that we customize; other sites are done completely custom. I have two business partners that are graphic designers, so I usually have them working on concepting.”
What will be the next big development in webpage design? “I am currently working on six web site projects. In November, I finished seven web sites. Last spring, I built a web site for a foundation within the University of Minnesota; I am just about finished with a web site I am doing for a foundation within the University of California, San Francisco. My most well-known client is Mothers Against Drunk Driving.”
Have you ever worked with website templates? “Yes. A lot of the web sites we do today are built in the content management system Joomla. We work with our clients to customize their templates. We also do a lot of Photoshop templates that are converted for Joomla.’
What website template providers have you tried? “Several . . .
http://templateclub.mambosolutions.com
What was your experience with them? “I especially like the Rocket Theme templates.”
What do you think about Flash technology? “Since a big part of what we do is build search engine friendly web sites, I never build web sites entirely in Flash. We use Flash in the banner or as a graphic accent.”
What are the advantages and disadvantages of using Flash? “Search engines have a hard time crawling Flash. Web sites built in Flash pretty much hide all of their text and links within a graphic file that is not indexable.”
What are your sources of inspiration? “I own a huge library of graphic design books. We ask our clients to provide us with a list of web sites that they like. Template sites are also good for inspiration.”
What are your favorite website designs that you did NOT design yourself? “Hard to say. I see lots of beautiful sites.”
What was the toughest project or customer situation you’ve encountered? “We do a lot of ecommerce sites. These are always challenging, because software is never perfect ‘out of the box.’”
What are your interests and dislikes in webpage design? “I really enjoy what I do. I like helping my clients market their businesses using the web. It’s very fulfilling when I hear from them that they are getting leads and making sales from their web site.”
Thankyou Joanne, for your insights and the variety of great looks on your websites.
Getting Into the Christmas Spirit,
Arthur Browning
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