The history of this project is interesting. Indeed, there was no prospecting, this project fell on me without warning, at a time anything but professional.

I had my driver’s license for less than a year and I was taking part in the mandatory post-license 2-phase courses. We alternated between having fun drifting on the track and theory. At one point of the day, we had to introduce ourselves in order to get to know each other better, and when I announced that I was in the field of web development, one of the participants directly asked me for my contact information in order to pass it on to her husband who was jointly managing a wedding dress store in Sion.

This project was my very first website for a client. I organized my very first workshop to gather the need, understand what they wanted to promote and what they needed. This allowed me to learn about UX, to find the right balance between the client’s need and the visitors’ needs, and to discover the joys of developing alternative CSS depending on the browsers (yes IE, I’m looking at you with your CSS sheets specific to each of your versions 😑).

The client wanted to have a site where he could show off all his wedding dresses, evening gowns, and accessories. So the idea was not to set up an online store but a showcase allowing him to have a presence on the web and to propose a catalog to visitors in order to make them want to come on site.

So I opted for a Joomla (it was one of the simplest PHP CMS at the time) on which I added a theme that I seriously reviewed, modified, and restructured to match the UX, the navigation workflow and the expected graphic style. The client wanted a sense of chic and luxury. So I went with the gold and burgundy theme.

So here is what the site looked like when it was delivered in production.

Not bad for a logo made with Gimp, a fully flipped theme, and a Joomla modified to hell, right? 🤘🏻

All kidding aside, of course now with hindsight, there are ways to do so much better, but for my very first site for my very first client, I was proud of it!

After it went live, I continued to maintain it until I quit my freelance job and joined SQLI as a full-time developer.

Unfortunately, I found out that the store closed its doors for good (I don’t know exactly when), so I had to use the wayback machine to offer you a screenshot. I hope the owners just wanted to move on.