About a year ago, I received an email from a Belgium-based yacht dealer who was in need of a new Flash website. He tried to build his own without much success and decided to look for professional help –always the best option.

Des Voiles D’Or (The Golden Sails) is the name of his business, and his website project sounded exciting yet overwhelming at the same time. It would have to show the excitement of sailing yachts, the essence of Italy (because these yachts are Italian), adventure, nice background music, and the most important request from the client was: “an intro animation where you can see the sails clapping in the wind”.
I knew he was envisioning a slick video of rich people sailing on their fancy yachts in the Mediterranean Sea, but how was I supposed to make that happen?

A couple of weeks after this, he hired a photographer and flew to Italy for a photo shoot and then provided me with all the pictures. He also obtained a promotional video from one of the brands he sells and cut the clips together with the photos and text he provided, and finally added an intriguing music track. Check out the result here.

Despite the fact that the website had many sections, the design process was smoother than I’d imagined. I began by designing a site map that helped me keep organized -I always try to do this when a website has many sections and subsections-. This is what the site map looked like after a couple of revisions from the client:

Afterward, I sent him my first drafts of the website. He liked them so much that I only had to refine a few details.
Here’s a comparison of an early draft vs. the final product:

initial draft

final design

Once the design was completed I worked with one of my programmers, Fabio Pinatti, to complete the backend of the website.

www.desvoilesdor.com successfully launched on March 2009.