Iberia Rustica is a new venture that provides an advertising platform for properties & products throughout Spain & Portugal. This made it necessary to create a multilingual web design, which threw up a few challenges.
At the time of writing this post, the website has just been launched, so there are as yet no advertisers on board. The business owner required the website to be up & running in order to acquire advertisers, giving them an easy way to submit their properties or products.
VISIT IBERIARUSTICA.COM
The Logo Design
With the business name being Iberia Rustica, they were aiming to convey the rustic countryside of Spain & Portugal, but in a friendly way using an illustrated style. I created the circular landscape icon to instantly convey the colours of an Iberian landscape, with a blue sky & sunset scene.
The Web Design
Continuing with the illustrated, rustic style, I created a vector illustration of a landscape using olive greens and blues for the main header background. Throughout the website I opted to use a mixture of fonts, a display style font for the main titles to reflect the logo, and classic seriffed fonts for all other titles & body text.
Multilingual Functionality
As this website was aiming to target advertisers in Spain & Portugal, it was important to add a language switcher. As this is a WordPress web design, I utilised one of the free language switcher plug-ins, but initially this raised a few issues. When using a WordPress theme that allows you to customise the style options, I found that when switching to Spanish or Portuguese, the CSS styling that I had set using the standard customiser was totally stripped away.
So I had to completely hard-code all of the CSS styles within the main theme CSS, so when the user switched to another language, the styling would remain exactly the same.
Future support
When the website gains a few advertisers, I have set up a property listing system and a products listing system to display the content. So for the initial few months, this will be an ongoing project to add new properties & products, fine-tuning the website so it works as the owner expects.
As with all of my web design projects, I offer total support to ensure the website works for the business. And of course, I have given the owner a bit of training on how to add properties and products to the website in the future.
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