On Monday we met with Debbie to show off our design mockups. Wednesday Debbie came back, bringing in three board members who would need to be involved in the decision. They discussed various things about the site, including what it will be including and what they have for it.
They also were ready to make a decision on the mockup they wanted. They had done some user testing of the mockups. Rocki’s was chosen. It has a picture of the front of the farm in the header, which they liked because it would be the first thing you’d see if you went there. But they did want some changes to it. They wanted a lighter brown for the wood grain that makes up the other part of the header. They wanted a more solid navigation menu rather than the hanging signs currently in use. And they wanted a less cluttered appearance for the home page.
They gave Jason’s second place. His was very clean, also using a wood grain and a horizontal drop-down menu. His drop-down seemed to be more along the lines of what they wanted, so something like that may be placed into Rocki’s. Many of us were thinking that Jason’s would be chosen. But you can never be sure.
So finally we will get to start building the actual site. This should be the fun part, certainly the part that I have more experience with. The site will be built using WordPress, so there won’t be a lot of actual programming most likely. We may need to figure out how to interface other data with WordPress and add admin pages for it. We will certainly need to figure out how to use “feeds” to get the information we want where we want it. We’ll need to figure out how to set everything up so that it is easy for them to update. Most of this should be doable within WordPress or using plugins, no hardcore programming. We’ll see though.
A lot of time will certainly be spent turning Rocki’s Photoshop theme into a real WordPress theme. Then of course there is the insertion of the pages and filling them with content. It will need to be organized in a way that will be easy to update for the Stearns people. This may be hard.
I’m looking forward to some fun and some learning.