Tamarack Camps
This premiere Jewish Youth Camp facility had the goal of creating a website that appealed to the age 12-18 demographic while reinforcing their decades of excellent programming and service to parents. Alongside the brilliant Carl Winans and Oceanvue, we struck the balance of those two specs by utilizing large, colorful buttons and playful typefaces to catch the eye of the younger audience, and incorporating various jQuery elements (such as accordions and tabs) to display large amounts of content in a functional way.
My Role
I was given the task of turning a photoshop design into a fully functional Wordpress theme. The challenge was implementing advanced functionality and involved design composition, with small development budget.
Process
We decided to utilize a Wordpress theme from themeforest.net that would be easy to skin, and already had the advanced functionality built-in to the theme.
Challenges
"Camp Begins" counter.
Tamarack expressed the need to display a widget that would show how many days are left until their camp season begins. We tried many Wordpress widgets, but they were quite bloated and did not allow for enough customization. We ended up writing our own PHP function that we could easily modify and display on any part of the site.
Handling large amounts of content on a single page
We had to come up with solutions for displaying large amounts of content on a single page. The solution needed to be simple enough for the Tamarack staff, of whom had varying levels of content-authoring expertise.
We ended up using a shortcode plugin called Tabsy that would generate tabs on demand through declarative markup. This solution required very little training and was an effective way to fit large amounts of content on a page.
Technology
Wordpress, PHP, JQuery, HTML5, CSS3