It’s been a long time in development, but my E-commerce bookshop website design for the Paris based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has just launched.
The Process
My initial designs were submitted in 2010, making this significantly the longest amount of time I’ve spent on a single project by some way.
I actually left Ehaus, the agency I worked at responsible for delivering the website, several months ago when there was still a lot of technical work to be completed and I was personally working on it up until about 6 months ago.
It was an really interesting project to be a pert of, partly due to the complex nature of the project but also because the design had to work in synergy with existing branding guidelines that required a careful approach when repurposing them for such a complex design infrastructure.
Dual Language and Multi Currency
Visual designs were initially submitted and signed off in English, but once the process of developing the designs into web pages began to take place we could start to view the French language version of the website. This concerted testing process invariably led to subtle changes to the layout, impacting our original visual aesthetic.
This was largely due to phrases or words being longer in French which would sometimes break design elements which meant we had to reconsider and tweak the initial designs.
As well as being dual langauge in French and English the website also accepts payments in Pound Sterling, Euros, American Dollars, Japanese Yen and Mexican Peso.
Responsive Design
The time the project took to come to fruition was largely due to the complexities of handling the large dual language and multi currency back-end databases that the client required, but also because of the changing way websites were created and delivered during the development process.
The initial visual mock ups and development predated a time when responsive design was a serious consideration, but during development the need to make the site accessible on different devices grew so we had to revisit both the visual design and front-end development during the build process.
Once again this meant having to revisit the way the website was constructed, but with some careful tinkering, we were able to deliver a finished website that had grown during the process of development to fully meet the clients needs.