My latest commission — RSA Comment — is a website where you can read opinion pieces, watch topical videos, comment on them and even submit your own writing. The site carefully follows the corporate branding of the RSA. It uses WordPress as its underlying CMS, has a complex home page layout and multiple columns on all pages. This was one of my most complex website designs so far – and a pleasure to work on.
It’s important, when designing a website and writing content, that you do so in a way that’s meaningful and useful to your client group.
But what if your site’s visitors are split into groups with distinct and very different needs and different intellectual abilities? How does a single website serve both people with a learning disability, and health and social care professionals? Let’s see how the Mencap website – a design I particularly admire – successfully tackles this.
The Royal Marsden Cancer Campaign’s plan
Built in Drupal with a fun, wonky design, cute imagery and animated cupcakes. Nice use of a hand-drawn typeface and unmissable donation buttons. This is a mini-website devoted to a single initiative and dedicated to getting people to sign up or donate. Check out the rest of the site for more cute animations and simple sign-up forms.
I designed the website for the Council for Voluntary Services in Hounslow. This is an independent body that supports, advises and represents all voluntary groups in the London Borough of Hounslow.
Their old website was just a single page with a few logos. They wanted something better, designed to match their colour scheme, with far more content. Importantly, they must be able to edit the content themselves and publish regular news items.
I designed the website using WordPress as the content management system (CMS). WordPress is an easy enough tool for the staff at Hounslow CVS to use to edit their website’s pages and posts. >> Read more…
The Nominet Foundation is a charity that provides funding to innovative projects which strive to improve and encourage the safe use of the Internet for educational, inclusion and other charitable purposes. They give grants to organisations with innovative IT-related projects that can make a positive difference to people in the UK, developing countries and around the world.
Initial funding came from Nominet, which maintains the .uk register of domain names and is one of the world’s largest Internet registries.
On 29th April 2009 the Nominet Foundation announced the first projects to be funded. >> Read more…
More than sixty people gathered in Galway, Ireland in April 2009 to talk, learn, and exchange ideas about Drupal. Drupal is a popular, reliable and very flexible content management system that’s used on many well-known websites. While they were there the attendees built free websites for two Irish charities. You can see the results at www.ruralsa.ie and www.zikomo.org. Both look great, well done to those involved!
Back in Australia the FullCodePress competition to build two charity websites has announced its team members and attempted to answer a tricky question: are events like this damaging to the web development community? I don’t think that charitable one-off events like this are anything other than a good idea. They’re nothing like design competition websites such as 99designs.com which encourage cookie cutter designs for minimum pay. At FullCodePress and the Drupal competition, professionals are pooling their skills to create quality products at no cost, purely for the challenge and the social good.
I was commissioned to redesign the website of The Irish Support and Advice Service. The result is a small, brochure-style website.
The website was built around WordPress so that the charity can edit their own content. I designed the theme from scratch, mostly avoiding typical Irish colours. >> Read more…
The Ectopic Pregnancy Trust’s candle tributes website is one of the more interesting, worthwhile and challenging web projects I’ve worked on.
The Ectopic Pregnancy Trust, an organisation that I’ve worked with on and off for the last eight years, commissioned me to design a new mini-website. The site gives women (and their partners) who have lost a child to an ectopic pregnancy, opportunity to light a candle and leave a message in remembrance. >> Read more…
Bad Behavior has blocked 843 access attempts in the last 7 days.
