Giulio Benvenuti

Project History

One evening in December 2020, my friend (but above all actor, dancer and performer) Giulio calls me to tell me that his personal website has 'disappeared'. I try to figure out what the problem is, since I had developed that website about three years earlier.
The problem was quite simple: the website had been left there, forgotten. The domain and hosting service had expired long ago, and our internet service provider had removed all the content from the site.

I said, "Hey, let's take the opportunity to take over the site from scratch and create a new project!"

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The steps I followed

Research and inspiration

First, I met with Giulio to understand his needs, his expectations and the content he wanted to include on his website. We chose to use the Wordpress CMS because it was familiar to Giulio and because it would allow us to keep costs down. In particular, I chose to use the Elementor PRO sitebuilder because it would allow me to build the website in a flexible way without necessarily being tied to a template.

Then, I undertook a divergent research phase, drawing inspiration from various sources on the web. I asked Giulio to do the same.

I put all the resources we found into a moodboard.

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Content organisation

We agreed on the organisation of the site content and the structure of the individual pages. Giulio took care of the production of the contents, and I took care of their distribution.

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Website style

Giulio had a vast amount of stock photos at his disposal, and in particular he had a fantastic up-to-date photo book created by Emanuele Giacomini.
For this reason, we opted for a simple, clean style to give the images the right emphasis.

I used three types of font:

• Trade Gothic Bold for headings;
• Futura PT for paragraphs;
• Secret Winter for texts with a particular emphasis.

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Once the stylistic elements were defined, I prepared low and high-fidelity prototypes to show Giulio before developing them on Wordpress.

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Website developement

After receiving approval of the drafts, I developed the different pages on Wordpress.
Through Elementor PRO, I created predefined templates for Giulio's show pages and for the different dynamic contents, so that he could be autonomous in inserting new contents in the future while maintaining the style and structure of the pages.

Once all the pages were developed, I checked that they were adapted to tablet and mobile resolutions.

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What did I learn from this project?

In this project, for the first time, I was personally involved in the whole process of developing a website (from conception to putting it online). This approach allowed me to pay a lot of attention to the design phase, as I myself had to develop what was designed in the most functional way possible.

In addition, I was able to develop the site so that it could be easily updated by Giulio.
The most stimulating part of the project was undoubtedly the close collaboration with Giulio: it was a site built 'in four hands', where we both felt involved and free to experiment.