Stonebridge City Farm (2011)

Upgrading a local charity to a Wordpress-based site with a custom theme

Published , updated by Richard GoodwinFiled under Web design

Stonebridge City Farm is a free attraction within walking distance of Nottingham city centre.  They have a range of large and small animals, grow fruit and vegetables, and offer the opportunity for local school kids to experience farm life.

This started out as a simple consultation on a design that a local student had proposed to refresh the Farm's basic website.  However, only a simple design was produced which didn't really fit in with what the farm wanted to achieve, and after the student lost interest I was press-ganged into filling in.

It quickly became apparent that the people at the farm wanted to do content updates on a regular basis, so a "flat" website had to become a Wordpress-based implementation with a custom template.  Plugins were added to handle an events calendar and document downloads for (e.g.) permission form templates.

After consultation I came up with the "slice of the country in the heart of the city" concept, and built the header from a series of image layers that stay centred and filled the page width without stretching or squashing at various (desktop) sizes. A year or so later I learned about responsive web design, and went back to make the site work on mobile devices - but at the time I couldn't get the layers to play nice, so I cheated and swapped in a screenshot of the header at small sizes!