CB Hermanovce
I didn’t have a lot of time to take on another project when this opportunity came along. I certainly wasn’t interested in doing it for free. Fortunately for CB Hermanovce, a small church in Northeastern Slovakia, I not only feel guilty taking money from churches but I feel even worse when they have terrible or nonexistent websites. So against my better judgment I agreed to design and build a new website for a cause I believed in. My plan was to donate one hour a night for one week making this the the fastest design and development cycle I have ever set for myself.
After the initial fifteen minute conversation to basically go over what exactly CB Hermanovce wanted, I grabbed my sketchbook and started wire framing. It took one hour to go from blank page to revised digital composition. I used Adobe’s Kuler application to provide a quick color scheme. Next was WordPress’s five minute install and a few hours spent coding a three file template that could be used to serve all of the sites different content. A short round of testing and polishing followed before the website was setup to receive content.
The only design input I received was the desire for rotating header images and a “big footer.” Slovaks like short bursts of information so the aim of the design was to create a page that would look respectable with little to no actual content on it. Fortunately, both of their requested features helped with my design goals. Along with the featured content header I also made sure to include a fully featured image gallery and options for posting audio recordings of sermons. Both features that, while not immediately requested, I think will be well received and easily adopted. The biggest weakness in this project is it’s lack of rounded corners in Internet Explorer. To save time I decided to use the CSS3 border-radius property. While this works in most modern browsers it leaves Internet Explorer oddly boxy. Given more time I could have used images or javascript for full cross browser compatibility but in this case it just wasn’t an option. This site is currently being built out with content and will be live soon.
Note: what you see here are screenshots of the coded website before the final content was added. I have pledged to give an additional hour to refine any formatting issues and last minute touch ups after they have finished this process.