website design with a more personal touch for www.shropgeek.co.uk
A custom themed Wordpress blog.
This project was more personal to me than most of the websites I build. Shropgeek is a collection of geeks based in Shropshire that regularly meet up to discuss all things geek. In September 2009 one of the founding members (and good friend) passed away at the age of 27 (I have written a bit about this here). A fellow web developer he had built the original website but unfortunately with his passing no body had access to update it. As an active member, I was asked if I would build a new website.
Because Shropgeek is a community of people I wanted this to be reflected within the site and decided that the popular open source blogging software, Wordpress, would be the best platform to suit this project.
Notes on design...
Shropshire is a beautiful part of the country and I wanted the design of the site to reflect this. As this is a community site, I decided to incorporate photographs of Shropshire that have been taken by the members. Shropgeek has been well established on twitter for some time and the avatar is a photograph of the Long Mynd, in south Shropshire, so it seemed an obvious choice for that to be the first photograph viewed when you visit the site.
I wanted these photographs to be immediately striking so the header area was given a black background to do this. However, the main content of the site needed to be clean and easy to read. Therefore, the content area was given a light background in direct contrast to the header. The subtle blue hue was then added to give the site a little colour and make the whole theme feel more friendly.
There are also a few additional design choices I made as a silent nod to the original site and its creator. The first website had bold stripes which were extremely striking so this seemed an obvious choice to add a little texture to the design. I did however, choose to make them more subtle so as not to detract from the photographs or the content. I also decided to use the same original font choices for the headings and the body copy.
The design of the site uses what is called a fluid layout. This allows the page design to stretch to fit the monitor used by the person viewing the site instead of it being a fixed width that sits centrally within the window. Either technique is perfectly acceptable, and this type of design decision usually depends on what the web developer is more comfortable with. Normally, I build pixel perfect fixed width websites however, I felt the design on this occasion would be more suited to a fluid layout.
Build and features...
This website was an opportunity to experiment and really play with the Wordpress platform. Knowing that it would be updated regularly by multiple authors, it was a great opportunity to experiment with the author functions already built into Wordpress.
The site features the ablility for multiple authors to post with links through to pages about each author and a list of their posts.
The site also features several pages (as opposed to blog posts). Some are static with content that will rarely change and some display posts from very specific catagories. This is a great feature of Wordpress and allows it to become much more than just blogging software.
Some of the other features included within the theme that are not standard to Wordpress include, popular posts, most recent comments and the @shropgeek twitter feed, all of which add to the community feel of the site.
If you are familiar with me around the net you will recognise my avatar and know that I pop up all over the place!
I realised that I don't have one central area for all of my online profiles so this area is exactly that.
I am an active twitterer and through Twitter I hear about all sorts of tips, tutorials and blog posts, if I find them interesting I bookmark them to my Delicious account. Check out my tag cloud to find a subject of interest.
I have started to upload some of the photos I have taken to my flickr account now, and I am also on facebook.
Find me on facebookMusic is a huge part of my life. I listen to music at work, at home, in the car, pretty much anywhere I can. Recently I came across a new music player called Spotify.
Spotify is essentially an online music library which you create an account for. What I like about it is that because everything is stored online it means that you can access your playlists from any computer that has Spotify installed just by signing in.
The other thing I like about Spotify is you can share your playlists with other people, I am rubbish at creating my own playlists so I find websites like www.sharemyplaylists.com great. Here are some of my favourite playlists. Enjoy!
- Kirsty's music to work to - by me!
- Ultimate Grunge Playlist - by ZepHead
- Guitar Hero Smash Hits - by olegafx
- Rock Band 2 - by codeeater
- 80's - by christianse
- Chillout - by ryanajarett