FreshFishDesign

This week we launched IsleOne – a website aimed at helping people find all the best places to go and things to do on the Isle of Thanet. This article explains some of the thinking behind the site and gives a rough timeline for its development.

Months ago

We’ve had the idea for this site for a while – a more grown-up version of ThanetKids. There are a lot of high quality places to go in Thanet but it didn’t seem like there was a website that reflected this. So we’ve been researching ideas for the site and compiling lists of places since the beginning of this year.

Weeks ago

Once we’d put together most of the content, we could look at how the site would be structured and start to think of a design. We settled on four main categories for content – places to eat and drink, shops, things to do, and places to stay in Thanet – plus room for a news section and a contact page. We’ve also designed the site to be extendable in case we want to add further sections in the future.

With a structure for the content in place, we could start to design the actual look and feel of the site. We wanted something that was dynamic, cool, and that would present its listed businesses in the best possible light. So the site is very visual with bold images accompanying each listing; the front page is divided up into animated sections; and there are a couple of information feeds from other parts of the site and from external sources.

The overall effect is intended to be dynamic without being distracting. The main point of the site is to highlight all the quality places to go in Thanet – the design should support that, not overwhelm it.

Days ago

Last week was mostly spent taking the design out of Photoshop and building the web pages for real. The site is built on WordPress which means it was relatively simple to configure. When everything was working correctly, we took the site out of the test environment and placed it on the live server.

We then started to add more content. There are currently around 20 businesses listed on the site and that will probably grow to around 40. So if you know a quality place to eat or somewhere to go in Thanet, please let us know.

Seconds ago

Part of the thinking behind the site is that it should be live and dynamic. Anyone visiting IsleOne should be able to see the most up-to-the-minute information. To that end, we included a section called ‘the latest’ which pulls in the most recent tweets from a number of Twitter feeds. It updates itself every couple of minutes to ensure it’s displaying the very latest news and gossip from relevant organisations and individuals around Thanet.

There’s also a news section that allows for more in depth articles. The news section is intended to promote events in the area. Eventually, it may be that businesses listed on the site are able to contribute and update articles themselves.

The future

Although the site went live over the weekend we were still updating content so we didn’t publicise it. Even so, people still found the site via Twitter and the feedback we’ve had has been really good. It’s always great when that happens. We hope the site will continue to be so well received.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 28th, 2010 at 9:06 pm and is filed under Web design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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