Website Design - Dulce Vita Skincare

We started our work with Elva, the owner of Dulce Vita Facials with a goal of creating a brand identity and redesigning her website.

Elva is a licensed esthetician who empowers her clients through facial treatments, helping them look and feel their best. After a few meetings with Elva, it was evident that she had a clear vision for her business but it wasn't fully being conveyed through her current website. Also, after visiting her location we noticed the lack of branding—something that is very important for clients to recognize your business and make the connection. So, with this in mind we got to work!

The Process:

More than just a name
When we started out with Elva, she let us know that although she primarily does facials and skincare treatments, she would also want to potentially sell her own products in the future. With this in mind, we felt that the name Dulce Vita Facials was a bit limiting for her because she offers so many other services that are not encompassed in 'facials'. It was almost immediate that we thought of replacing 'facials' with 'skincare', to have a new name of Dulce Vita Skincare. This new but similar name seemed to fit where she is now, and where she wants to take her business in the future. ​

But first, a logo
Now that we had a new name, we needed a new logo. Elva felt very inspired by hibiscus flowers and their many uses in skincare, so we kept that in mind when designing her new logo. In the end we created a clean and simple design that featured Dulce Vita's initials DV, and the full name. This is the primary logo, and is used on the website. We created a second, more stylized logo that uses the same fonts but incorporates the hibiscus flower, to be used on product packaging and other marketing materials in the future. Janet wrote a blog on the full logo process, here.

New Website
With the other brand pieces in place, we could really get going on the new website. We normally build our sites in Weebly but tried something new by using Square's online website builder. Square seemed like a more strategic option for a number of reasons. Elva currently utilizes the Square point-of-sale system for her business so it would be a platform and interface that she would already be familiar with. Also, Square's platform has a more sophisticated ecommerce and customer management system with their base package, and since her long-term goals included selling product we figured that it would make sense to set her up on this initially so that she wouldn't have to upgrade or move in the future. Lastly, she was interested in creating an online booking area that would be easy to manage. Square's system is straightforward and links seamlessly with the site and the POS system.

Although Square was a great choice for those reasons, it gave us a few design challenges along the way. It didn't have as many design features as we were used to on Weebly, and wasn't as customizable as we would have liked, but we pressed on and we were able to achieve the site we wanted.

Elva's old site's color scheme was primarily white and a light purple, and she wanted her new site to have the same feel. We went with different shades of this rich lavender you see in the photo above, using the darkest shade for the text. We also used a bit of a pastel blue and a background image of a cream moisturizer that added some texture and depth to the pages.

Elva had lots of content for us to work with so we tried to keep the aesthetic clean so that it wouldn't look cluttered or overwhelming. We broke up some of the text on the Specials and Treatments pages with colorblocked sections that could help with navigation. We also added anchor links to certain sections of the longer pages so that clients could easily jump to the section they were interested in. 
Since Elva is very much at the heart of Dulce Vita, we wanted to make sure she was a focal point of the website and that people were able to get to know her. We featured her welcoming headshot and short bio on the homepage and then expanded on it on the About page. We had Elva do a full photoshoot with photographer Tira Howard, which resulted in tons of really great photos of Elva in action and headshots to choose from. 

Lastly, we purchased the URL dulcevitaskincare.com to match her new name and had her previous URL dulcevitafacials.com forward to the new one so that there is no confusion. 

CHECK OUT ELVA'S SITE

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This website was a great learning experience with the Square platform. I'm glad we tried it out and were able to deliver a site and logo we were proud of. Working with Elva was great, I am excited for her to start 2022 with an elevated brand to match her awesome business.