Like everyone else, I have my preferences with how an informative website should look. Clean, crisp with easy navigation. After having a sit down with the spa owner I got a pretty good feeling that I knew what she wanted, I just needed to find a comfortable layout.

Keeping the logo and menu tied in at the top of the page and using a 2 column information system enabled me to keep the spa hours and contact form easily available throughout the site. On the homepage I decided to add a third column which gives different avenues for featured salon services. By using a minimal amount of images it’s not only allowing the site to load quickly, to keep the site aesthetically pleasing I added in some fonts via javascript. Simple, yet effective.

I’ve never been a big fan of loading several pages to get the information you want, nor a fan of gigantic pages with more information than you know what to do with. I’ve been playing with a few different concepts for the services page on the site and think I came across one that works pretty well. By implementing jQuery and using the toggle function I was able to put the different Spa services in divs then hide or open the div keeping the information where you want it.

The requirements for the makeup page were simple enough, display thumbnails that open larger image on click. The traditional way to open images is in a pop up box, the annoying thing about a pop up box is that they’re ugly, browsers open them differently depending on the settings and they often get caught by pop-up blockers. I’ve used lightbox and thickbox for a couple of projects and fancied something a little different, what I found was a nice little tool called shadowbox, it offers similar functionalities to the other too but it seems to be a far more polished version. It was uber easy to implement either the JQ version or using the standalone version and adds the desired effect, in short, it works and works well.

That’s pretty much it, the site took around 12 hours to build, find the images I wanted and polish off fully.

Check it out and tell me what you think: www.mindbodyandspirit.ca