What I was up to this weekend…

April 15, 2012

Made this for my undergrad chapter.

They haven’t had an active website since I graduated. One of the neos reached out to me about helping them get it up again a few months ago, but she was still working on content.

Did a little pestering so they could have something up by their Charter week, and this was the result. WordPress of course (I refuse to be a webmaster).

Wanted to do a portfolio template for a while, but never had the content to support it.

Also ex-ing that plan to design templates for people to just download…I don’t have the patience for designing public websites anymore for chump change. Too much to consider (resolutions, mobile, tablet, browser type, browser version, having 532 toolbars that makes the actual content window like 600px high, etc.)

Realized I don’t care about usability for my own stuff since I obsess about it at work all day…and it’s even more important to consider that on sites like this, no telling who the audience is.

Unconventional websites are cool, but only if the audience is expecting it. Had to make accommodations for a broader audience (the menu that comes up when you first visit used to show the pages only when mousing over the logo, the images on the top of each page were meant to just show a snippet before but now expand, lowered the resolution of all the pictures to 1000px wide or less, the image gallery fails to javascript if flash isn’t available, etc.)

I also am normally against autoplaying music on sites, but I think it’s okay for presentation sites like these.

When they first publicized the site, 70% of the hits were from smart phones. Fascinating! It’s why I changed the menu interaction…and am considering making a mobile version…

Yeah…for web design requests though, please go to themeforest.com. They have cheap, but unique templates that can be used by web design newbs. Pretty sure they have some portfolio ones like mine too.

Always consider your content though. I’d say have all of it written and all your images collected before even thinking about how it should look.

Greek Life

7 Comments

April 16, 2012 at 11:06 am

Patrice

Nicely done. I must start embracing WordPress. I am nowhere near your your level of competence and proficiency. Nor am I as organized: I have a tendency to do most of the planning in my head and fly by the seat of my pants . . .
Reply
- April 18, 2012 at 1:36 pm
  
  KaNisa
  
  WordPress is so versatile these days. It really can do whatever you want…limited only by your imagination.
  
  I wonder why people choose other providers…
  Reply
  - April 19, 2012 at 1:20 pm
    
    SeraPhoenix
    
    I actually used to wonder why people chose WordPress…now that I’ve been developing in it though I completely understand. The plugin library alone is worth it. I still use Blogger for myself because I’ve accepted that I’m a slave to Google and I’m used to it…but we’ll see what the future holds…
    
    Nice site!
  - April 19, 2012 at 1:44 pm
    
    KaNisa
    
    Blogger has been coming along! I’ve seen some really creative templates for it!
April 24, 2012 at 4:30 pm

Patrice

I was leafing through themepress.com today. It has some very creative, tidy themes. With the recent proliferation of new devices (and more in the pipeline, like Project Glass head-mounted display), it looks like the near future will be all about responsive web sites, which to build from scratch would be quite a bit of work because they must be made to reconfigure gracefully to fit up to four screen sizes. Where there is a small budget, I see a mass migration of designers/developers to existing responsive themes and adapting them to fit their clients’ needs. In short, I think more than ever it is important to learn WordPress or some other CMS platform well.
Reply
- April 24, 2012 at 7:12 pm
  
  KaNisa
  
  I mean really it’s technically not difficult to make cross-platform websites, the hard part is to account for all the different browsers. For example sticking to standards rather than proprietary APIs makes things easy, but how many people use a browser that renders HTML 5 and CSS3 correctly? Learning CMS systems does help as a lot of them have plugins that account for the different platforms, but to REALLY customize the experience, you still have to know some granular code.
  
  It’s going to be a struggle for me as HTML5 seems to make things more complicated (ie a nav tag that’s basically a specialized div?!) But it will be interesting to play with. Maybe I will see the benefits once I play with it more.
  Reply
May 21, 2012 at 3:23 pm

GTalumna

Good job on the website! Most ppl saw the “announcement” on twitter, which is why most of the hits were from mobile phones.
Reply