A buddy was pitching his services to BizCard.com as an SEO expert and asked me to sit in on the meeting to make “his company” look bigger (more people than just him) and if a graphics question came up, he’d have someone else to actually answer those questions instead of B.S.ing his way through them.

What happened next is one for the books. The CEO and his head tech guy asked my buddy four or five questions that for some reason, he just would not (or could not) give them a direct answer. It felt as though he was going to try and  B.S. his way through this meeting to land the SEO assignment.

The CEO looked at me and asked a simple question to which I gave a simple, straight forward answer. He asked me another question, and again I answered in a straight forward manner. Then his tech guy hit me with some really tough structure questions and I said I didn’t know the answer to his first two questions, but the third was completely wrong if  what he was asking me was what “BizCard” truly believed.

Later that evening I got a call on my cellphone from the CEO thanking me for my honesty during our meeting and asked me if I could come back — alone to discuss an assignment to completely update the GUI of the BizCard.com website. We met the next day and I was given the assignment which I insisted have a “human element” in the design as that was truly the only thing lacking aside from better usability and graphic organization.

This first section was the introduction of the “human” factor to the website I insisted on adding. Each section was made up of a group of four header images I designed which reflected the core of the BizCard.com business — business card designs.  The marketing concept behind all of these header approaches was to launch with stock models and then quickly replace the Shutterstock.com shots with actual customers, proudly holding up their business cards printed (and possibly designed) by BizCard.com. The entire approach as I presented it to the CEO of BizCard.com was to introduce a human element that was missing from every page of the website. He agreed and told me to run with my approach.

From an executional approach, these images were displayed using a standard java script slideshow with approximately a 1.75 second delay to each photo. The script was coded for continuous rotation and seamless pre-load in the background to expedite image transitions for each page.

As part of the Home Page redesign, I pitched BizCard on the concept of developing and integrating a visual carousel to highlight the work as a customer would want to see it, by design shape, size, and possible design selection. Once again, the CEO agreed with the concept and layout I presented and was told to follow through on that as well.

I also showed how BizCard could find and entice better designers to become part of the BizCard.com network by highlighting exceptional designs and designers on the front page and possibly charge customers a premium for using these people. Below is the Home Page layout that was incorporated these changes.

In total, I created 48 banners that covered each of their categories of business which included; Business Cards, Magnets, Postcards, Letterhead, Invitations, Announcement Cards, Thank You Cards, Note Cards, Occasion Cards, Seasonal Cards, Mommy Cards, and possibly Envelopes.

For example, here is another set of four banners I created for the “Stationary” header category.

As part of the redesign, I worked closely with the programmers to guide them in the graphical user approach changes I wanted to incorporate in to the consumer user experience as one might go through the process of searching for an existing design, modifying that design, pricing, ordering and then up-selling the user to other items that would automatically wrap their approved design on these items in order to entice them into additional purchases.