Recent Website Design Process - Azesta
Website Design for Coaching Business - Azesta - The experiential learning company
I’ve been so fortunate to work with Shirley Gaston, owner of Azesta on their new website.
The importance of having a website ‘home’
More than ever before, I feel it’s so important to have an online ‘home’ that represents your business, that can market your services and/or sell your offerings effectively.
Having a Facebook page or Instagram bio isn’t enough to represent your business and with more people leaving social media, a website that answers your ideal customer’s questions and is not dependent upon the logarithms of another platform is essential.
Below I share a little bit about Azesta and what they do, as well as some details from my brief including some of the practical needs for this 7.1 Squarespace website, so let’s get started. Please click the link for other recent examples from my website design client portfolio.
Coaching Website for Shirley Gaston, Azesta Ltd
Firstly, Shirley is an excellent experiential learning facilitator (her client testimonials are amazing!) and together with her very able facilitators and office staff, they design and deliver engaging and inspiring experiential learning programs.
The brief
During the detailed and lengthy client ‘interview’, one of the aspects of the business that I helped them uncover, was the values that drive the business and here are some of them:
Creativity, flexibility, openness, informality and caring.
Hopefully, you’ll agree with me that these values shine through.
Their previous WordPress site had been very problematic and access to the site had become impossible, with pages not working etc due to technical difficulties. The site had been hacked and rebuilt and didn’t represent the business effectively. Shirley wanted a site that represented its key values, would attract its target audience AND was easy to edit and maintain.
Screenshot of old azesta website
Needs for the new site
The new site also needed to integrate with their existing CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system that Azesta staff regularly handle via a local CRM company called Kulahub.
It was also important to add some newly designed free sign-up resources, sign-ups to future networking events, various form integrations as well as the functional capability of offering paid coaching tools and workshops on a resources page.
From a design point of view, Shirley was keen to include lots of creative elements and flair into the site as well as Azesta’s pre-existing brand colours of pink, green and grey. You’ll see the brand colours used throughout the site and the Azesta ‘leaf’ too. I also adapted the leaf design and used this as a background component in muted grey on all the pages. It was also important to find the right fonts for this project and I really think the chosen fonts enhance and reinforce the overall end result.
Azesta leaf design incorporated into the site
Being a company that has its heart in the Yorkshire Dales, Shirley thought it a great idea to include photography that connected with her love of nature, how she enjoys incorporating experiential learning outdoors and her father-in-law, John Lockerbie a professional photographer, was happy to provide the imagery. I think the excellent photography really compliments the whole design beautifully, don’t you?
Early on in the design process, I had created circular frames that contained chosen images with some text for both the home page and the resources page and this ‘look’ was to be used throughout the site for consistency.
Home page - framed circles with text
Framed circles for Azesta paid resources
Once the site was completed, Shirley wanted various extras such as bespoke email signatures, a ‘picture cards’ page, all the blog posts to have a similar design format with the circle frames and then, Facebook messenger integration.
Bespoke email signatures for azesta
Screenshot - picture cards resource azesta
Framed circles for ‘ideas’ page
The site was complex to create - it had a lot of moving parts such as the design work, integrations, styling, and previous blog posts that needed individually integrating into the new site. However, the project is now complete and the client tells me she has received some wonderful feedback from clients and the site’s analytics show that traffic has increased tremendously due to extensive work by myself on their SEO. I’m also pleased to say that they have retained their #1 ranking for specific long-tail keywords and traffic is already increasing for new ones.
Azesta testimonial - featuring beautiful photos by John Lockerbie
Azesta testimonial with brand colours
Thank you Shirley, for your kind words:
“Jane worked creatively and patiently with us to develop a website that truly reflected our brand. She also worked tirelessly to resolve technical issues and effectively partnered with some of our other suppliers to seamlessly integrate the site with our other IT systems. She became very much part of the team and managed the project effectively using Asana. She is also very reliable and responsive to queries and questions. I would highly recommend Jane to build your Squarespace website.”
So, thank you again to Azesta for your business. Please have a look at the site and get in touch with them if you would like to work with Azesta in the future.
If you’re interested in learning more about my website design services, please contact me.
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