I met John Corvino in person several months ago, and after learning his partner worked in the same company as I did (albeit in the Detroit branch), we stayed in touch, and he asked me to take a look at working on his website. John is a prominent speaker/writer/lecturer on moral issues surrounding gay rights (hence the moniker "The Gay Moralist"). In fact, he debated Maggie Gallagher, president of the National Organization for Marriage, just last week.
For his site, he wanted to not only give it a clean, vibrant visual makeover, but also make it easy to update and provide an automated way to sign up for an email newsletter. I've found that virtually all clients at this point want the ability to update their sites themselves, and it can be tricky to build a site with a content management system that does not require any coding knowledge on the part of the person doing the updates.
For this execution, I did a slight restructure of the information architecture, and then used WordPress (which I also used for my 2k50 site) for the implementation. I wrote a visual theme for it from scratch and used the "Pages" and "Categories" features to organize the content. I also figured out a few other cool things -- I managed to sync up an RSS feed of the columns John writes for 365gay.com so they appear on his site automatically (and in the proper category). I also used a combination of WordPress plugins and Feedburner to build a free, automated email newsletter for him -- all within the same admin interface as updating site content.
I am finding that WordPress has a lot of benefits (although there are some unfortunate issues that require workarounds), and will probably continue using the service for similar clients in the future.
Check out John's site at http://www.johncorvino.com/.
No comments:
Post a Comment