Art on the Bay is a craft show in New Baltimore, MI. Locals set up booths to sell art: paintings, jewelry, metal work and other handmade items.
Every year, the show has a new design, which will be featured on posters, applications and things like that. And to go along with those things, I was asked to build a new website.
Their old site was built using a site builder tool. Although it looked really nice, it didn’t have to functionality that the show committee was hoping for – namely interactive maps, live application forms and responsive code that allows the site to work on mobile and tablets.
With these goals in mind, I worked with the committee’s designer, Justin Rose, to start development of the website. With logos, colors, and a home page mockup in hand, I began development.
One of my major goals for designing this website was for it to be easy for the client to update it and work on it. Because of this, I decided to customize the Make theme, which is built to allow users to add columns and images very easily.
To save us both money, I used the free version of the theme. It doesn’t have the same customization options as the paid version, but I edited the theme’s template files by hand to make up for any loss in control that I had.
This technique proved to be successful. I was able to match the design exactly without making any compromises. I was also able to customize the responsive behavior by writing my own style code.
Although the site will likely be rebuilt next year, I didn’t treat it as disposable. Building it with solid bones and editable code will make it easier to work on next time it’s time to be refreshed.
Web Builders – A Good Solution?
Web builders, such as the one used by GoDaddy, can be a reasonable solution to some web design needs. With simple tools and limited functionality, they can be used to put up a simple web presence. Here are our hours, our address, and phone number. Go to our Facebook for more!
The biggest issue with web builders is the one that I ran into while launching the Art on the Bay website. Web building accounts don’t typically come with hosting. That means that they can’t be upgraded very easily. There’s nowhere to upload the files for a new website!
What we had to do was purchase hosting, then move the old website to a different account. This resulted in about 3 hours of downtime while we waited for all the servers to talk to each other and agree where the site was now located.
After that, we were able to upload the new site, hook up the database and launch the website.
Next year though, it will be much easier. Paste in the new content, upload some new template files, and boom! The new site is up immediately with little or no downtime.