Jeff Bridgforth :: Webcraftsman

Launched Sep­tem­ber 2009
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Des­tino is Cam­pus Crusade’s con­tex­tu­al­ized min­istry to Lati­nos. They wanted to redesign their Web site. The objec­tives for the redesign were to:

• sim­plify the interface
• make it eas­ier for non-technical peo­ple to update the site
• giv­ing it a per­son­al­ity that con­nected to Latino students
• a design (and con­tent) to boost the cred­i­bil­ity to the Des­tino brand

Sim­pli­fy­ing the site was a mat­ter of audit­ing the con­tent and decid­ing what to keep and what to let go of and cre­ate an infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture to sup­port that.

Word­Press was my choice for empow­er­ing the Des­tino team to man­age and add future con­tent to the site. I used some plug-ins to increase the usabil­ity of admin­is­tra­tive inter­face. I cre­ated a guide for the Des­tino staff so they could under­stand how to use Word­Press to update the site.

Most of my time was spent try­ing to cre­ate a new visual iden­tity for the site. I started by try­ing to find com­mon graph­i­cal ele­ments that the breadth of Latino cul­ture shared. What I found is that each cul­ture with what we call Latino is very diverse. I found that cre­at­ing a com­mon visual iden­tity was quite a chal­lenge and I did not want to set­tle for a cliché.

My final solu­tion uti­lized a neu­tral back­ground color with noise added for tex­ture. The neu­tral col­ors made the red and black col­ors pop. I knew that I wanted to have pic­tures of stu­dents on the site and this became my solu­tion for cre­at­ing an inter­face that con­nected more with Latino stu­dents. Rela­tion­ships are really val­ued in Latino com­mu­nity so most of the pic­tures I chose had mul­ti­ple people.

The final piece of the puz­zle was hav­ing a team­mate write a PHP script for me so that we could cre­ate a cus­tom min­istry loca­tor that drew infor­ma­tion from Cam­pus Cru­sade data­base. The loca­tor page had been sta­tic on the pre­vi­ous site.

I like to learn some­thing new with each project. On this project, I used RGBa trans­par­ent color for the first time. I also used jQuery for the first time. The tran­si­tion from the con­tact link on the top right on the page to the con­tact form at the bot­tom is more of a spin. The text box in the con­tact form will grow as needed like on Facebook.

My role

• Visual design and layout
• XHTML and CSS coding
• Word­Press setup and coding

Key Ben­e­fits

• Empow­ers Des­tino team to man­age the con­tent of the site
• Con­tent more relevant
• Pro­fes­sional and clean look boosts cred­i­bil­ity of the brand

Tech­nol­ogy

• Word­Press
• Pro­gres­sive enhance­ment using CSS3 (RGBa transparency)
• jQuery
• More Fields Word­Press plugin