At the Crossroads
A director at the Regional Arts Commission (RAC) asked me to design and build a website for a conference here in sunny St. Louis. The challenges were that RAC:
- Needed the site yesterday
- Didn’t have the content available
- Required a content-management system (CMS)
- Had a limited budget
WordPress
I don’t know about you, but this sounded like a job for WordPress. WordPress has the accurate stigma of being known as a blogging platform. Yet, for those who haven’t kept up with WordPress’ development, you should know that it has evolved into a highly customizable CMS. In addition to being user-friendly, WordPress can generate clean code, maximize search engine optimization (SEO) and offer a quick platform to develop upon.
Design/Layout
The design of this site is pretty straightforward. The color scheme comes from the colors in the provided logo. Purple can be typified as a creative color, among other things. A white background was chosen because it lent good contrast and readability (and because the logo didn’t work well over any other color). Overall, this site had to be created quickly, so most of the effort was put into usability and readability. It was decided to keep the design minimal.
Crossroadsconvening.com is a content-heavy site that categorizes and links together a lot of related data. Most of the site’s pages have a column for core content and a sidebar with a quick-event list. This allows users to dial in on details without having to leave the page to search the event schedule.
The site went live in the nick of time. The conference was great, and the website received many positive comments. However, my favorite comment came from the director of the conference:
BTW – even I have been able to update, add and change copy. So this is good!
Thanks.
Roseann