Building but not Designing
This week saw the launch of the new website design for the crew at Green Roof Shelters Ltd who are, besides their other designs & products, doing their part to re-cycle shipping containers into all conceivable sorts of shelters & spaces resplendently adorned with a range of wildlife habitats.
This was a different one for me, I had no hand in the design process but instead was asked to reproduce in the site build exactly what was given to me as pdf layouts by their designers. Transferring a design from ‘paper’ like this has it challenges, rarely are the original dimensions laid out in pixel units and so some scaling has to be undertaken to get the site design to fit, with the subsequent result that a lot of pixel nudging is involved once the general layout had been nailed into place.
Included on the list of features that were requested for inclusion were an interactive illustration with rollover labels describing the green roof container features, randomly rotating versions of their logo throughout the site, two separate twitter feeds displayed on certain pages [as well as the now usual selection of social media buttons], both a contact form and an email link which would pre-fill the subject & body text sections of the draft email, plus a news section which could update and maintain themselves with minimum effort and training.
Constructed on a WordPress base using Headway Themes’ website design tool, it was initially built offline on a local server running under MAMP Pro and then migrated to the live server using the incredibly simple & reliable BackupBuddy plugin. All that remained to do afterwards was to correct a few link URLs and indulge in a final round of browser testing.
In the end it proved a remarkably smooth and positive collaboration, though that did mean there were too few excuses to meet up for coffee…
