Ellis Jewelers is a local jewelry store that requested a replacement site for their aging static HTML site. I took on the project and produced a dynamic site based on their business perception and requests.

Ellis Jewelers has been in business since 1916 and has two retail locations. Their business is very traditional and focused on providing excellent customer service. They prize themselves with their custom jewelery design and repair services.

As keeping an online inventory would be difficult to manage with limited staff, I proposed a website that would focus on their business model. The jewelry store advertises selections as they become available. I decided to use a campaign based setup and a presentation layout for the site. The campaigns are comprised of featured items from a selection and encourage site visitors to contact customer service and come to the retail location. The homepage of the site has an animated content slider to cycle through the current campaigns.

Ellis Jewelers

The site colors and textures are based on previous branding from Ellis Jewelers and the colors found at their retail locations. My goal was to reproduce the experience of being inside the stores while surfing the website.

The site is made up of XHTML and CSS semantic code, while the animated content slider uses jQuery. The content slider is degradable to work with JavaScript disabled browsers.

The site is managed by Wordpress. I have designed several sites on Wordpress now and I am falling in love with how easy it is to design with. Wordpress has traditionally been a blog content management system, but I have been expanding its capabilities through custom inputs.