Before and After Case Study, ceramicsbynooshin.com

A walkthrough of the design design process and all of its challenges.

January 27, 2025

Introduction

Nooshin’s an awesome lady here at the Western Avenue Studios building. She came here from LA where she had a ceramics shop and did very well locally. After covid she had to move here to the East Coast and start over. She’s been struggling to find the success she once had and that’s when she approached me for a website redesign.

She was clear that she liked her website but had issues with the person who initially built it. We sat down to look at what she had and what her goals were for the website. Some of the questions I ask when I’m redesigning a website are:

What is the purpose of your website? (Sales, portfolio, information)

What do you like and dislike about it currently?

What type of style or feel do you want to convey?

Are there particular things you MUST have on your new website?

Here is what her website looked like originally

Build Out

The goal for this website was to showcase Nooshin’s very unique creations while focusing on her best sellers. She was comfortable with Etsy handling her sales so in the design we just linked her Etsy store on our website’s “shop” link. She’s a one woman business and I wanted to really bring that into the style of the website to show that handmade really meant handmade. Her studio is just beautifully chaotic and I wanted to capture that for audiences to see how her whole life kind of revolves around her work and her cats.

She really wanted to keep the purple tone and initially she thought her website looked fine. She just wanted to “freshen it up”. This led into our first major hurdle… How can you show someone what a modern day well-designed website looks like when the only website they’ve ever experienced was one from 30 years ago? You can’t.

I knew change was going to be hard for her and throughout the process I made a lot of design concessions to keep her happy. In the end, I was okay with those changed because I still believe we could achieve our goals. Then came the nitty gritty kind of work like transfering domains and setting up an ad campaign. I wont get into the ad campaign here but transfering a domain shouldn’t be too difficult. You log into your account on your current domain registrar, unlock it, get the authorization code, initiate the transfer on the new registrar, change some DNS settings and bam, all done. Except in this case Nooshin had about 3 different emails and had no idea what email went to what and no idea what the passwords were…

At this point, it felt like I was helping my grandma try to figure out her TV. I went from a web designer to a full on 24/7 personal assistant. I was fine with it, because like I said, Nooshin’s an awesome lady. She trusted me with her investment and I wanted her to feel like she could come to me if she had any problems. She’s also a self proclaimed “pain in the ass” so at least she knew she could be difficult. This isn’t always the case with people.

Anyway, with the final product delivered and live, she was very nervous. It wasn’t until other people started telling her how much they liked her website did she start believing it.