Christina Fowler

Title: Leeds RAG

URL: http://www.leedsrag.org.uk

Tasks: Site Design (Site programmed, set up and commissioned by Kieran O’Shea of KJO Hosting)

Leeds RAG run social events, fund raising events and hitchhikes all in aid of various UK charities. Check out especially the calender, gallery and forum pages which are fully customised for the RAG site.

It was very hard to make a forum look good but I gave it a go!

Design Influence:

Design Process:

Once RAG had chosen the ‘desk’ design from the two options provided I set to work concentrating on 3 specific areas of the site; the calendar, the forum and the gallery. As these were the focus of the website and promoted the interactivity that the previous RAG site didn’t have I wanted to really incorporate these areas into the ‘desk’ design. Originally the RAG site started with the content being fit around a big background image - similar to this site, however it soon became clear that this would alienate any users with wide screens and compromise the look. I altered the background image to be tiling however this did mean relying on .png files to create all the shadows from the ‘post-its’ and ‘polaroids’ which are unfortunately not supported in Internet Explorer version 6 or below. Therefore, if you are browsing in IE 6 or below then you are not seeing the website at it’s full potential!

Firstly the calendar; as I was working directly with the designer of the calendar code it was easy for me to customise the calendar completely. I started with getting rid of the automatic styling of the site and then adding background images to every element of the calendar with the onus on staples and highlighters. You can see the original basic design of the calendar here. Unfortunately if you are viewing the calendar in Internet Explorer 6 you can’t get the full beauty of the transparent highlighting. Please, please, please upgrade you browser to Internet Explorer 7 or even better download and use Mozilla Firefox instead - you will find this a much faster and more secure browser. The RAG site looks much better in either of these browsers and many other sites will be the same!

Secondly I customised the gallery; the focus here was on using a ‘brown paper’ background and I then added the ripped paper and staple to hold the titles and links. The ‘polaroid’ borders are created using one of the options in the plug-in that is used to create this gallery.

Lastly I created the forum. I trawled the net looking for inspiration on creating a fully customised forum but I found that they didn’t exist! I could not find one website that had used background images for posts or any other type of customisation except just using block colours. However, I was convinced that I wanted to use ’sellotape’ to stick the forum together and make the RAG forum look as interesting as the rest of the site. Working with Kieran we managed to get the forum code to a stage where I could add background images as I wished and the forum you see now was born! The second issue with the forum was making the index pages look interesting - the tabular format needed to stay but I wanted to make the background image fit with the scheme. I sketched out the table on to a peice of paper to see where I could customise it but I realised the sketchy and wonky lines that I had drawn to signify the table might actually look good on screen! Et Voila!