Bsktweetup

The site had been live since early November 2009, but was given a temporary design, so it was time to put something more permanent in place. This is actually one of my own sites, since I organise the local tweetups. I decided to call in a Gamajo Tech Associate, Darcy, to provide the design aspect for this project.

Darcy was given free reign on the design, with the only conditions being that the logo was to stay as it was, and that the Twtvite invite was to stay in the sidebar. We wanted a design that was fairly simple, to reflect the simple nature of Twitter, and also not to distract from the main focus of the site – giving out details about the tweetups.

Designing in the Browser

Rather than go backwards and forwards trying to perfect a design in Photoshop, Darcy and I worked collaboratively on the live site evolving it as we went along. This approach to designing in the browser was new to Darcy, but provided instant feedback on the design in it’s native environment.

In some ways I actually prefer to work like this – I can make some changes to the design far quicker than even the fastest designer doing the same thing in Photoshop – plus, you can check it’s implementation cross-browser immediately.

Some design purists may argue that this pollutes the design stage, and that proper design shouldn’t be concerned with the technical details – I would totally disagree; I can’t see how a design can not be tailored to the final medium it’s being designed for.

There weren’t too many technical challenges on this project. The site and base theme were already in place, so my main task was to implement the design elements that Darcy provided.

Development Additions

The tweetroll was an added extra – instead of using the native WordPress widget for links, I decided to write my own function to achieve the same. This then allows changing the format of the links in one single place in the code, rather than having to edit each link individually.

Grabbing the Twitter avatar for each user was also interesting. I took the code implemented and described at Twivatar and created a copy on my own so that we weren’t relying on an site outside of our control. Now that Twitter have whitelisted this copy application, the images are being delivered consistently.