Ali's Alley Gets a Face Lift!

I just had the joy of working with Alley from Ali's Alley to redesign her online store's whole look and feel. Her old design was created by using one of the CafePress templates to which she added her own section thumbnails.

After a few messages back and forth and a few initial mockups, she had the brainstorm that she would really love to see her shop design play off the alley part of her shop name and create a back alley theme. She wanted brick and graffiti. And here is what I came up with:


Here you can see that I created a custom brick background that looks like the side of a brick wall down a back alley. The graffiti logo appears as though it has been spray-painted directly on the brick. I created green street signs for headers in the sidebar to elaborate on the theme. At the top we decided to go with a grid of her bestsellers. This will allow the customers to easily see her wide variety of unique and fun t-shirts and gifts.

For the section thumbnails, I created simple white road signs. This ideas came when I thought about back alleys having dead end signs. So, these were done it that style. She also really wanted to link to her other stores in a unique way. That is when the idea came to place a sign with an arrow that says "This Way To:" and then green street signs linking to each of her other shops, like Forever Pets, Wedding World and Just 4 Grandma. Here is a screenshot of the bottom half:


The bottom navigation and top navigation links were done in a dark blue to add color and contrast to the red, beiges, and greens throughout the rest of the design.

For comparison, I would like to show you a before shot of her old template:


Although, this design was very clean looking and organized, it did not let customers know what her store was all about. It did not showcase her designs at all. And did not have the edgy look that her designs had.

It was an absolute pleasure creating this custom CafePress website design for her.

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