Marketing Campaign Website

UI - Frontend Develop

The Request

A scuba diving company approached me with a request to create a marketing website for their campaign. It is a series of images videos and text from many, many interviews of scuba-divers. This was to be very image-heavy to emphasize the beauty of the ocean and underwater exploration.

They wanted to be able to self-serve with the content. This meant they needed a CMS to control the content.

My role in this project

Project Manager
User Interface Designer
Front-end Developer

Challenges

This was a freelance project and communication would be important for speedy delivery.

There was an already established brand for the company I was hired from. In order to keep the styles correct, I would need to work with their Marketing Design team for feedback.

WordPress is constantly updating its themes so I would need to create instances of everything being used to always be able to roll back if the custom theme created errors after updates.

Approach

Design for an immersive experience. So the desktop was desired. Also, the larger the screen the better, so LARGE images. I used WordPress plugins to ‘smush’ images so they would load faster.

Impactful for people interested in diving. To do this, it needed to leverage ways for users to signup or ‘dive deeper’ 🙃 with progressive disclosure leading to a way for the user to sign up.

Blog feed from PADI with most current interests based on a hashtag for consistency.

WordPress CMS for marketing editors to add content. The content would be a simple form that a content editor could add / edit / remove.

Solution

The website came out to look like an image gallery for the featured diver with slideshows and pop-out videos. When transiting between diver content, the page would fade to black and the new diver content would display. Making the experience more like a profile page for that diver plus a news feed for relevant content.

The CMS chosen was WordPress. Adding a new diver to the roll was as easy as adding a new blog post. Just fill out all the content and then select the gallery location for the diver

Learnings

Creating a custom WordPress theme is much more time consuming than selecting one that is close to the desired result and manipulating the content from an existing point.

The website maintenance after delivery was not fully structured. Because of this, there were expectations that needed to be upheld.

WordPress is a very slow platform. No matter how much you try to speed it up, there is just too much code for a fast build out the gate.