Simon Farrow Illustration

I’ve been working with Simon for a number of years now producing various online assets for his clients and now it was time to look to produce a website to promote his own unique style of illustration.

Working from a design provided by Simon I quickly put together this site using my own WordPress framework allowing us to get the site up and running within a few weeks.

Simon is fully able to add as much new content as he needs – and I will be encouraging him to do this every time we speak! In fact Simon was responsible for setting all the content himself.

I’ve kept the content editing element as simple as possible, but as flexible as possible with my own custom page builder. I strongly believe that not limiting what can be displayed on a page using a prescriptive template system is perfect and provides extendability far beyond what is seen now.

We have number of blocks that can be added – carousels, related pages, written content, galleries – each added sing a column based layout setup so he can customise the layout for both desktop and mobile devices. Of course if Simon comes up with a suggestion that is not yet in place I can simply develop this in as required.

I also prepares the ‘shop’ section to be easily migrated into Woocommerce – should this be desired at a later stage – but initially, and sensibly, we kept this very simple to test the water and decide if its viable to provide an online ordering service before committing to the additional development required by such a solution.

I spent considerable time optimising the codebase to obtain the best possible (and practical) scores with Google PageSpeed tests and have provided Simon with advice on how best to make use of SEO in both his writing, and string of key SEO elements – right down to the naming and tagging of imagery.

The website is also retina enabled to ensure his images have the absolute best fidelity on retina displays, which considering the content we have is vital in this instance.

Following on from this project we immediately dived into the development of his company website Acerte, modifying this WordPress theme to accommodate the differences required for that website – while keeping costs low due to the reuse of the core codebase.