Flights of Nancy
Flights of Nancy is the website of Natalie Chandler, digital & mobile marketer, copywriter and editor.
Information Architecture & User Interface Design & Interaction Design & xHTML coding & CSS3 & WordPress integration
Flights of Nancy is run by an ex-colleague and long time friend Natalie Chandler. We first worked together at a mobile advertising start up that was run within the PA Consulting venture program. Since then we have worked on a number of different projects together, combining her editorial and marketing skills with my user experience and technical know how.
So when it came time for Natalie to have her own website she turned to me for help.
She had a good idea about what type of content she would like to form the site, and a rough idea of a style that she would like, and that she would like to use the popular (and familiar to her) WordPress blogging / content management system to power her site.
Understanding the audience
Before I could start the design process for the site we spent some time understanding Natalie’s target audience, answering questions about what they would be looking for and why they would be visiting the site. We also took time to understand Natalie’s own goals for the site, looking at what she wanted to sell, promote and get across to the audience that we were targeting. This allowed us to define the content and functional requirements which, in tern, I used to inform the Information Architecture.
Structured content forms the design
Once we had the Information Architecture worked out I was able to start working on the a individual page layouts and designs. Which I mocked up in a HTML and CSS prototype so Natalie and I could both see and test the designs in a browser to really understand how each page would look and feel. It took a couple of rounds of mocking up, reviewing and refining to come up with an overall design that both Natalie and I were happy met our objectives, but by working with real code and reviewing the designs in a real browser we were able to iterate through designs and arrive at the final design quickly.
Custom WordPress theme development
Once we had a working mock up of the site and its design I then built a custom WordPress theme, keeping the content management of the site as vanilla and as simple as possible to make sure it was in keeping with Natalie’s previous WordPress experience.