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The Project:

This was a website redesign effort focused on improving brand awareness to consumers within the power catamaran retail and private/charter vacation rental sectors. 

The Client:

Aquila Yachts designs, manufactures and retails luxury power catamarans.  They also have a division that manages private and public charter services.  Currently they offer 3 primary power catamaran models with a 4th one in production. They are headquartered in Clearwater Florida and have multiple international dealership locations as well. 

My Role: 

As Project Manager and UX/UI Designer my role included the following responsibilities during this project’s life cycle.

• Coordinated and facilitated all project meetings
• Meet with Aquila team for brand knowledge share sessions
• Reviewed and updated Aquila brand guidelines
• Created change request documentation outlining schedule of deliverables
• Translated stakeholder concepts into features
• Produced Balsamiq wireframes & mockups
• Communicated with stakeholders regarding design changes and approvals
• Conducted product walkthroughs
• Completed content migration process
• Provided essential content editing training
• Built out all changes in staging environment for pre-deployment testing
• Managed User Acceptance Testing (UAT) effort
• Coordinated final deployment effort and provided post launch support

The Evolution:

This project was somewhat unique because it involved taking some existing content and design elements and combining them with a new look and feel. Once we identified the target areas of the site that were to be carried over, I began by creating Balsamiq wireframes to illustrate my vision.  Based on resources, budget and availability I proposed a tiered schedule for deliverables to allow us to make some significant design improvements in a shorter time period and keep the project moving forward.  This suggestion was accepted and we began with the homepage design followed by landing page template designs, forms, and finally a modified model page template layout.  

Collaboration:

Front-End:  Worked with agency partner for necessary front end development support on navigation and styling changes. 

SEO:  Partnered with in-house SEO lead regarding necessary content changes to ensure efficient and optimal site ranking.

Deployment:  Worked with Sitecore Developer to coordinate deployments to live production servers.

Design Tools:

Balsamiq, Adobe Photoshop