Viva Language Services

At Chadwick Design we were given the brief to design a website for Viva Language Services, a Peterborough-based company which offers Spanish lessons to both children and adults.

The client showed us several websites which they liked, all of which shared a few common themes. Many of them were tidy and compact, having a large central box into which all the information was fitted. Many were also very colourful and used bright colours for the text/navigation bars. Seeing other sites the client likes, helps us to get a feel for the style of design they are hoping for.

We used a large image of a Spanish beach as a background image for the body of the site. This was photoshopped so it would run to a solid colour at the bottom and would tile horizontally, thus covering the largest space possible, (no matter how big the computer screen it was viewed on) while the image itself would remain small so it would load quickly.

The supplied pages of copy were split up into the sections “Tuition”, “Online Learning”, “Testimonials” and “Translation”. As well as these subheadings, we also added a contact page with a contact form to hide the company email address from the spam robots.

We chose the images and colours carefully to make the website look vibrant and fun. For the text and headers, however, we used mainly red and yellow/bronze to suggest the Spanish flag. The items on the navigation bar were given separate classes so that each button could be styled with a different colour.

The “Bienvenido a VLS” image was created in our studio, based on a stock image of a face drawn on a blackboard. We added the “a VLS” to personalise the image. We suggested using an embedded video of a flamenco guitarist on the homepage to give the site a Spanish ambiance, but suggested that the space could just as easily be filled with a video of a Spanish tutorial when the client has the budget to do this.

The VLS logo was chosen from a possible choice of six designed in our studio and the “Call VLS” icon was also created from scratch.

Each of the pages contains different text and a different set of images, but we aimed to give them all a common theme; using a similar layout for each and the same header and navigation bar for every page. The images of the flamenco guitarist and dancer above the navigation bar are archetypical of Spain but also seem lively and colourful, appealing both to adults and children.

The website was optimised for local searches based around the services offered by Viva Language Services, so searching in Google for the phrases along the lines of "Spanish Lessons Peterborough" brings up the website on page one.