Questions for the client

This post will discuss the questions I asked the client about the preferences for their professional website.  The list of questions are in bold as follows with the answers that were given to me:


Can you tell me what you are looking for in a website?  
Being a photography business, I feel I want the site to be bold and visual.  I think I would like a mostly black background.  I would like the logo that I am giving you to be in a large circle in the corner with the large "JJ" in a bright pink color.

Looking at other photography websites, I like the interactive slide shows that many of the other sites use.  I would also like for my site to appear to be one page, with the only thing that changes being the slide show and information int the box on that page.

(At this point I pointed out that many of the slide shows that she was referring to are done in flash, and I may not be able to provide that for her, but I could give her a slide show that meets her needs for now, with the intent to upgrade the site to the flash at a later date.)

Let's talk about the colors a bit more.  Do you want a black base image to be the background, or would you prefer just solid black?
 I think and image that is mostly black, but has some grey highlights.  I mainly want to the focus to be drawn to the logo and the box with the slide show. 

(At this point I opened up Adobe Illustrator and we came up with a solid black back ground with a grey oval gradient as a starting point.  She said to use that as a place holder for now and we will see she wants something different when she sees a more complete page.)

I next asked about the layout.  What are you looking for?
Over the black background, I want a box that resembles a postcard.  I want the bold logo in the upper left hand corner.  Finally the "postcard box" will be centered on the bottom half of the page, and it will have the images.  The key is that I don't want the page to be more than one screen on most computers.  The only thing I want to change as you navigate through the site is the information and images that are in the "postcard box."

Finally I asked about the exact colors.  I brought up a website that had web safe color codes and asked her to pick.
The colors she chose were as follows:

background: #000000
background highlights: #999999
Postcard box: #FFFFFF to an off white.  She wants to evaluate this more when there is a working demo.
 She also wants to pick the text colors and all at a later date.

This is where we left the meeting for now, with the agreement that we would pick it up when I had a working model.