Amir Oosman: Website Design Project
Project Scope
Amir is many things to me: a ridiculous drummer (I would argue easily one of the best in LA), an inspiring entrepreneur, and most importantly one of my best friends. He and I worked on this site for close to six months... planning, discussing, wire framing, designing, drinking, strategizing, experimenting, surveying test users, and finally launching to his huge social media audience.
He produces more content than anyone I know, which has definitely pushed and inspired me to do the same. Thanks, buddy ;)
Here are the tasks I had at hand when we started this project:
Organize content into an easily digestible layout
- Create a broad sitemap
- Organize video content into galleries
- Create a homepage that is simple for Amir to maintain on his own post-launch
Develop a powerful brand
- Find a simple, bold color scheme & contrasting, yet complimentary typography to match Amir's personality
Create a "modern, clean, minimalist" feel
- Add parallax video backgrounds to enhance importance of his video content
Create a custom mobile version of the site
- Site is responsive to user's device
- Custom mobile menu makes it easy for users to find what they are looking for (see image below)
Create an updatable event calendar
- Amir plays a lot of live shows, and he needed an easy way to add new shows, clinics, and tour dates.
Strategize blog content
- Help Amir brainstorm and develop new custom blog content that offers true value to his audience
Incorporate a customized lesson scheduling system
- complete with online payments
- Eliminates the "back and forth" emailing/phone calls to schedule in-person or Skype lessons
- Confirmation/reminder/cancellation/thank you emails are automated from a custom-designed email template system
Create custom contact forms
- For users to book Amir for gigs, clinics, or general questions
Integrate social media outlets
- Including an automatic Instagram feed, YouTube videos with links to his playlists, and Soundcloud audio
Teach Amir how to maintain the site and add new content
- He's pretty tech savvy, so he picked it up quickly... but it is still a learning curve when it comes to the technical minutia of maintaining a website
The mobile view of Amir's homepage.
Final UI Color Scheme
(check out my favorite tool to find a sexy color scheme)
Placement With a Purpose
Amir's site gets a lot of traffic, so I found a great tool called Crazy Egg to implement into his site so we could analyze where people actually click when they visit.
This allowed me to get an unbiased snapshot over a few of what was working and what wasn't working with the layout based on how many users clicked where. The screenshot here shows where users click based on where they came from (represented by a certain color) whether it was Facebook (desktop vs. mobile), Instagram (desktop vs. mobile), a direct visit, YouTube, a Google search and many more.
With this information, Amir and I had a good idea about what content we needed to feature, what content wasn't as popular, and how we could make for a better user experience by reformatting the homepage.
Pretty amazing technology, eh?
See It In Action
Still here? Leave me some love!
(it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside)