It seems still to be common knowledge amongst the majority of people that building more roads is a solution for congested traffic in urban areas. Wrong idea. It is even more wrong to think that building a road through a wetland would not have an impact on the environment.
To keep it short, as a person with a strong naturalist background and proactive thinking about environmental issues, I was pretty exited to take on the project of redesigning the old website and putting it into new shape and colour. It was the first time I have worked for a non-for-profit organization and the outlook of contributing my knowledge to the campaign was very exciting.
The design goal was to create a website that delivers news about the campaign as well as help to create an image of the Beeliar wetlands, which includes environmental values, beauty, sanctuary for the people of Perth and recreation.
As far as the design concerns, I decided to use a colour scheme that would incorporate green, blue and a nice off-red. Although the homepage would include a large panorama of the wetlands, I decided to work mainly with typography as a design element in the section and article pages. I used the “Laegue Gothic” typeface to give headings a bold strong character.
The website is driven by Expression Engine 2.0. It was a good opportunity for me to try out the 2.0 version. In comparison to the 1.6X versions it showed improvements, especially the file manager is now much more of a feature. I also tried out pixel&tonics Matrix add-on for the first time and was heavily impressed of how user friendly slide shows can be built. Uploading images, resizing and building slide shows without any additional third party plugin! One of the features that needed to be developed was an online petition. Expression Engines flexibility allowed an out-of-the-box solution by simply modifying the commenting module.
published: May/25/10
