East 180°
Site Development: Paul Sweeney
Site Design: Leny Evangelista
Publish Dates: August 2008 - Present
Me and Leny make a pretty great team, I like to think. However, on occasion, she’ll come up with a design like this: absolutely gorgeous, really creative, and a sodding beast to build. Running down the checklist of tricky curves on this site:
- Heavily textured background? Check.
- Numerous moving parts? Check.
- Tattered edges? Double-check.
Normally, I’d ask her to take a really tricky site back to the drawing board, or at least redesign it somewhat to streamline the development process, but in this case, I honestly didn’t have the heart: I love this design.So, I picked the design apart, painstakingly rebuilt a new PSD with minor tweaks to the design elements, and jig-sawed it all back into shape, and I’m quite chuffed with the results (for American readers; that’s a good thing).
Highlights: We use Active Campaign’s 12All on the back-end for our email database, and while a product like this on our own dedicated server has some definite advantages, it’s niche enough that you can’t easily grab a plugin off the shelf, and integrate it easily into Wordpress.
So, I built my own. Nothing fancy, and certainly not ready to be released for public consumption, but with this site, I inched ever closer to that elusive 1.0 release: East180 is the first site where I added AJAX form submission. Now, it’s just a matter of bundling up the widget, the plugin, and the AJAX interface into a neat little package.