What sparked my interest in this project was a friend of mine saying he needed some help with his family's website. I thought this would be a great opportunity to build my experience in web design and development so I took the gig.

Going into this project, I had built several landing pages before but this was my first project I was going to build that I knew a small audience would actually use regularly. I was familiar with setting up my neccesary libraries, deploying and adding custom domains so I was confident and excited to do the job.

This project exposed me to a lot as far as development and design. Coming into it, I was not aware of what a wireframe was, I never used figma for a project before and so initially, I didn’t. I use either. I had an idea in my head and went straight to coding. I learned you could say the hard way that there is a method to designing websites and software in tandem with my classes in school as well.

 So after spending all of that time making the first draft of the site with no direction, I went back to the drawing board and this time used figma to draft up wireframes and mockups before even touching code. The first mockups I did like when they were drafted and so did the client but when I started creating the code for the project, they wanted to go in a different direction with the design. Here is the initial mockup I did in figma that we decided to go in a different direction on:

 This time I did some research on how other drink brands designed their home pages. And through doing that I learned a lot and ended up finding some inspiration for a design we both loved. This site (https://en.manayerbamate.com/) was big in inspiration in my design process and choices. It also instilled in me how import it is to do a lot of and research on similar people / companies in the field because we can learn so much from our competitors.