en Passant not letting life just pass on by

When initial design of the site, I created a base site that I thought my client would like. Links to information, I thought she would use, created sample posts to populate the site and demonstrated the site to her. She hated it. Colors all wrong, layout didn't make sense and the website simply wouldn't work.

I started over with a different approach. I asked her to search for websites that contained content similar to what she wanted to post. Based on her results, we took each site she liked, and picked apart the different elements that she liked and what she did not like.

1. Bright colors, simple layout.
2. Animated graphics, portraying subject matter related items (beating heart, jumping frog, etc.)
3. Graphical buttons
4. Menu items along side (as compared to across top, or in grid along middle of site.)

Based on her client base (parents and students in low-middle income households), I made a few suggestions.

• We chose a basic 2-column layout. Looking at various Drupal Themes, I could quickly apply a theme to the basic site, which helped find a number of pre-done themes she liked. Nifty Corners screenshot had many of the elements she was looking for. Simple design, bright colors and even a large header area.
• No large or animated graphics. Considering most parents are likely still on dial-up Internet access, we don't want to add any extra bandwidth. We compromised with a larger graphic header (based on the Nifty Corners theme). We pulled colors from the graphic, to use for the various elements on the site (headers, links, mission statement, etc.).
• Graphical buttons, translated to links without the link-line. We considered removing the line, but wanted the interface to be intuitive, and left the line in place.

Once we had the look and feel of the site closer to what the client expected, we could work on how she would use the site.