Allie Keast Jewelry sells handmade jewelry with hand-shaped stones and found objects. Their site needed to support e-commerce as well as provide information on lessons, custom commissions, and their busy market schedule. 

AKJ’s sister business, Twenty 3 Designs, designs custom wedding and engagement jewelry. The Twenty 3 site needed to function as a portfolio and process information hub. 

I’ve spent a year partnering with Allie and Paige to support their jewelry businesses through visual design. This project wasn’t just a refresh, but a chance to completely re-structure their websites to better serve their clients and streamline back-end processes. 

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Site Architecture

I began with primary and secondary research —  combing through the existing sites, interviewing Allie & Paige, and seeking out direct and  indirect competitor sites.

After determining what functions each site needed to serve, I listed out the pages needed to serve those functions & organized them for clear user navigation.  

I built out the site architecture for each business in a Figma FigJam board. 

Wireframes

I built out a number of wireframes for each page in the architecture, refining until landing one one that felt right.

While wireframing, I asked my clients to collect competitor sites they liked or disliked, and give feedback on a handful that I had collected for them.

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Content & Photography

As part of the architecture process, I outlined a masterlist of content needed for each site (both written and visual). My clients & I went through a few rounds of revisions. We used ChatGPT to assist in basic content generation, which was then edited for accuracy and voice. 

Allie and Paige had a number of existing visuals for their sites, but much of it was dated or inconsistent. We hired a photographer to do a photoshoot in the studio, capturing process and people photos that felt professional & reflective of the brands. 

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Site Building, Revisions, & Launch

Once wireframes were completed and reviewed, I began building the sites. I defaulted to the site builders that my clients were already using — Shopify for Allie Keast Jewelry, and Wix for Twenty 3 Designs.

Content was being generated and revised at the same time that the sites were being built. We deviated from some of the wireframes and reorganized a bit of the architecture. This included cutting some content that wasn’t essential to the launch and adapting a couple of page elements based on what was possible with the given back end.

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Live Sites

Visit Allie Keast Jewelry and Twenty 3 Designs here: 
http://alliekeastjewelry.com/
http://twenty3designs.com/  ︎