Australian Olive Oil Company

[pauland]

Thanks everyone for your comments. With regard to the dark background, that was at the request of my landlords. Below is the original website I made them, with the colours reflecting the olives, and the olive oil (I optimised the photos to reduce the size of the file to upload onto the forum, so pics are a bit pixelated). They wanted the site to be different from the one I made - larger, and dark so I made a new one which they are delighted with (although I think the first one was nicer - just needed a bit of tweaking with the layout). With regards to it being in Japanese, they did not have the $2,105 spare to pay for a Japanese translator to translate the website, and using an online translation tool does a very bad job, so the site is only in English. They have been selling in Japan for 4 years, but have not ever had a website.

GV_10_11.webGV_10_11.web

Thanks for the info. I'd probably have been heading to a more golden theme, to reflect the lightness of the oil and perhaps try and check out some japanese sites to get some cultural references. We'd have had a bit of an arm-wrestle about it!

Perhaps a Japanese student could have done the translation for a substantial discount!

I know from my own experience in Europe that taking the time to try and adapt to the local culture and language helps no end. I would think it's even more the case for Japan.

The customer is king, so great job!

[gwpriester]

Beautiful work Abi.

Paul, I think the dark is rich and tasty. Even if the oil is not.

[pauland]

Paul, I think the dark is rich and tasty.

Yes, but now I'm thinking about coffee or dark chocolate.

[Big Frank]

I'm using a screen resolution of 1600 x 900 on my laptop and the content of the website is all below the fold. I think that's too much, having to scroll down to see even a single line of text.

I too think the colours are too dark. By all means use the colour of olives as a contrast, but I think to use it as your base colour is too dark. It's a mechanical, industrial colour and , for me anyway, doesn't invoke the wholesome, sun-drenched feeling of olive trees in full fruit.

[Abikadabra]

Hi Big Frank. I agree with you, the colours do not invoke the feeling of olives, but as Paul said 'the customer is king'. As you can see from my first site for them, the whole site is in the various colours of olives but they didn't like that. They had seen a site they liked on the net and they wanted those colours, and similar format. They originally wanted the site to be black, but I advised them against that, so we compromised. They also wanted the visitor to land on the page and see all pictures rather than text. Its sounds like your laptop has the same colour resolution as my laptop and that you are getting a black background and shades of grey (hence 'a mechanical, industrial colour). The site actually has a very deep green background, deep olive page background and the text panels used on a couple of the pages are in a deep olive green. On my laptop they are a deep grey, and so is the page background, whilst the site background is black. On my apple they are different colours again. I guess it doesnt matter how you create the site, the colours will never look the same on many computers.

[Big Frank]

It's your responsibility as the designer to point these things out to the customer and, if all possible, show them examples of web developer discussion to demonstrate that their personal preferences come second to what is best for the site. Some you will win, some you will lose, that's the nature of customers

[Cloud]

Always remember that the customer is paying. I will always suggest the right thing to do to a customer in regard to the website design and give reasons, you can't just say use this colour or that colour, explain why and if you can do that and explain that it will benefit the look and therefore business then the customer should come around. When it comes to the design of a website the personal tastes of the customer or the designer should not dictate the look of the site but the end-user.