John Spacht
John’s my crazily talented brother-in-law. He’s got more than two decades of experience as a heavy-duty Master Mechanic, which means he can fix just about anything with moving parts and probably do it with his eyes closed. By day, he’s the Transportation Supervisor for three—yep, you read that correctly—Chautauqua County school districts and serves as a Board member for the NYS Association for Pupil Transportation.
When John came to me, it was because he and his business partner were launching a new training and consulting business that would serve school districts and logistics companies across New York State. They wanted an ultra-simple, one-page website that would showcase their expertise, list their services, and provide a contact form so folks could reach out.
Done and done :) This one was near and dear to my heart and it was a lot of fun to give John’s expertise the platform it deserves!
The web design process
To get started, I set John up with a wording outline so he could envision how the site would come together and write out what he wanted it to say. He created his own logo and picked out his favorite shade of navy blue. He also stopped by a few of my favorite stock photo websites and downloaded a handful of free options to use on the site. Last but not least, he and his business partner sent along their headshots.
I took it from there! I rounded out the website’s color palette with an off-white, an off-black, a light silver, and a brighter blue to spice things up a bit. I picked out an approachable font palette, using Merriweather for headlines and Open Sans for the paragraphs and button text.
John wanted his site to have a very simple, clean look. Done! I leaned into the simple color palette and color-blocked the site—each section uses a one-color, flat background. I used his favorite navy blue and the bright blue accent color to highlight their services.
With the site’s structure in place, it was time to make it easy to navigate. Navigation is a unique struggle with one-page websites—because they’re just one page, they tend to be a longer scroll than more traditional websites. While social media has conditioned people to accept scrolling, it can be a turn-off to have to scroll a website or page for a long time before finding the answer you need. If people go too long without finding what they’re looking for? They’ll leave your site, and chances are pretty good that they won’t come back.
With that in mind, I added a dash of custom code to create a simple navigation with subtle, classy hover effects. Visitors can click a tab and the site will gently scroll them right to the info they’re looking for. When they get there, a subtle button will be waiting in the corner to take them back to the top of the website. It works beautifully on mobile devices, too. Glorious.
Take a look at John’s new website home page!
