Kristen Carter, a certified Martha Beck life coach, helps her clients to find their path in life.
After 25 years in business as a senior manager and consultant in South Africa and the United States, Kristen herself chose a new path: providing life coaching skills and services to companies and individuals.
Flow has just designed Kristen a new site, www.kcarter.com with social networking elements using Flickr and Twitter, and a blog which Kristen is updating regularly with interesting posts ranging from the importance of spending time doing the things you love to how to help yourself feel more like a hero and less like a zero, which all of us probably do at times.
Kristen helps her clients look within themselves and find new ways to reflect, feel and relate to other people which can help people in their workplace as well as personally.
Reatile Tshikalange (aka “Ati”) recently joined the Flow family full-time as a programmer and this was his first development project using Expression Engine.
“Built on Expression Engine, the site has a stable foundation, making it easy to extend in the future,” explains Ati. “Appropriately, considering it’s a life coach site, it taught me to go into new projects with an upbeat, can-do mindset.”
From the technical side to the creative, coming up with visuals for the site that would not be clichéd was a challenging task. “What emerged was the idea of a series of drawings in which paths were presented as incomplete,” says Janet Berger, Flow’s design studio manager.
After speaking to Kristen and experiencing some of her life coaching workshops, Janet recognised that Kristen’s aim is to equip people with tools that allow them to find their own way in life, almost like giving them the pencil so that they can complete the drawing (and their own path) themselves.
“The idea of the hand-drawn renditions as opposed to photographs helped to suggest Kristen’s very personalised, hands-on approach. Her life coaching changes for each situation as everyone has a different path to walk, so a series of different paths were rendered. The use of rich, gold-patterned banners was intended to suggest Kristen’s warm personality. The result is a memorable and distinct site that differentiates Kristen from the somewhat confusing visual landscape associated with her field,” says Janet.
Jade Archer co-ordinated the content of the site from a words point-of-view. “Kristen had a very good idea of what she wanted and it was great working with a client who had a clear vision for the website,” says Jade. “She was very clear about what she hoped to achieve with it and this made it easy to deliver a final product that not only looks great but is also functional and useful to the user.”