My Favourite Web Project of the Year

Yesterday I spoke about my favourite print project for the year. Today, I want to feature a web project but first, some thoughts on how I changed my approach to designing sites.

In some ways, the story for me this year was more about shifting from creating static web sites to using WordPress as an underlying technology.

I finally “woke up” to the reality that the technology had changed and that there was considerably more interest and excitement when various social media tools could be incorporated into a living, breathing web site. To do this, a static site would not do as well.

To be fair, I had considerable experience with this approach from when I was with the Creative City Network in 2002 where we deployed a content management system created by Tomoye out of Ottawa. I never found it horribly intuitive and it scared me off getting into that area for quite a few years.

I’ve seen the light!

The first site I converted to using WordPress was my own. I figured I’d better find out how all this works before I start offering it to others. Plus, I figured that if something broke on my own site, I’d be the only one who would get screamed at (by me)!

In the process of implementing all this, I attended a day-long session in Surrey called WordCamp and then later in the summer at BarCamp and I devoured anything I could read.

I’m not really a geek, so I’ve teamed up with Kulpreet Singh (he presented at WordCamp) and he’s been a great help for matters more technical (such as the site I’m re-designing for Arts Starts that will launch this spring).

If I had one complaint about using WordPress, it’s that there are some limitations when adding stunning graphics, unless you really get into the code. That’s where the older “static” style of design has some easier options.

My work this year has focused more around converting existing sites to ones that use WordPress as well as still designing a few that are static. In addition, I’ve worked more on designing components of sites — sub sections — that fit into a larger database-driven site.

My “favourite” site was probably Brenda Fedoruk’s who is a Vancouver-based flutist. This is a very small, static site that was done easily and affordably to enable Brenda to feature her recently released recording (which I also did the design of) and to help market her other skills.

Home page of Brenda Fedoruk