Site Colophon
The making of the Young Women's Leadership Charter School of Chicago website
Kruegelisms (Michele Kruegel) designed, developed and produced this site based on the updated needs of YWLCS with the help of Jen Thatcher, who built the database controlled portions of this site.
The old site presented a number of problems for site visitors, as well as for the staff at YWLCS who were tasked with managing the vast amount of content that was unintentionally "hidden." To increase ease of use, it was essential to reorganize content to make it more intuitive to navigate and, consequently, easier to find and administer.
Teaming up with the dedicated staff at YWLCS, a decision was made to organize content based on the site's primary visitors: the students, their families and the school's supporters (donors and volunteers). Content specific to those users was moved to their appropriate silos and color coded throughout the site. The remaining content was filed into new, easy to find sections.
During this process it became clear that there was need to easily manage multiple types of recurring content that had previously been managed with Adobe Contribute. While static pages are still being managed with Adobe Contribute, recurring and archived content is now controlled with MySQL databases and an easy to use administrator interface. Calendar, Press and Job listings are a few of the sections controlled with a database. Implementing these databases then allowed us to target users with dynamic content specific to them throughout the site.
Since students that come to YWLCS are from a diversity of backgrounds, it was important that this site have the ability to be translated. Using Googles' Translation tool allows for visitor to choose from a large variety of languages, and therefore, increases YWLCS's reach into their student's communities.
After solving many issues, including the ones mentioned above, the key to this redesign was to build a website to rise to the high level of YWLCS's student achievements while sharing updated information with the students, parents and the school's supporters and partners. As a living site, it will be a place for users to visit often and to attract new students who aim as high as YWLCS does.
Visual Assets
The logo was designed by Judy Sickle of Forward Design.
The majority of photographs used were taken by two very talented photographers, both of whom excelled at capturing what school is like at YWLCS:
Typography
Lucida Grande was used for body copy. Lucida Grande was chosen for it's humanist sans-serif type face which was created to increase legibility. Georgia was used for titles and headers and was chosen for it's increased readably on the web. As a serif font, Georgia was chosen to compliment to the font used for the logo and Lucida Grande was chosen to compliment the tagline. A combination of Veljovic Standard Book and FF Scala Sans were used in the logo.
Technical
Adobe Photoshop and TextMate were used to design and hand-code this site. The site is authored using structural XHTML, and complies with the 1.0 transitional web standards as set by the W3C. This web site validates as CSS level 2. It also uses PHP include technology for universal content.
The database was built in MySQL 5.1 and the site is written in PHP.
To incorporate photo galleries throughout the site we're using Flickr's slideshow widget. This image gallery allows YWLCS to display images on any web page in a professional, intuitive and simple way.