Designing User Experience (in an unfamiliar field)

I've just about completed my work for a new business called 'Caught On Clay' who asked me to design and develop an eCommerce website and accompanying advertising material including business cards, leaflets(shown below) and labels.

The business itself delivers bespoke, handmade ceramic tiles, onto which the customer's own photograph and personalised message are added.

Caught On Clay is a side business project lead by a local artists for whom I have created an array of promotional material for over the past few years, and they asked me if I would be inclined to develop their new website.

In spite of having little experience in this field - I couldn't allow such an opportunity to pass me by and so agreed.

I proposed that I should at first produce a demo site, which I hosted locally using WampServer - permitting me to acquaint myself with the process at no risk or financial cost.

If the client was dissatisfied with the result after a few days of work; then they would be free to seek out an experienced professional. Evidently, this was not the case and I proceeded to shed the safety net and move onto the real thing.

I started by reverse engineering a few other sites using the "View Source" tool found in most web browsers, which lead me to the conclusion that Wordpress and WooCommerce - an eCommerce plugin - were commonly used in the sites of small to medium sized businesses.

I treated this project as an exercise in user experience and user interface design; which is effectively what web design is after all. But it so happens that empathising with the customer, or user, is a skill that translates fairly well into software and games design, so it actually turned out

As well as the user; I also had a client to consider.

Naturally, I had to make decisions that were in their best interest whilst also endeavoring to meet their requests. This meant handling a (relatively modest) budget and conducting a lot of research into the different possible approaches to handling the fore mentioned requests.

Now the my work on the site is, for the most part, concluded for the time being.

The remaining work chiefly consists of developing web rankings and search engine optimisation - which appears to be an art form in and of itself!