Fair Farms Maryland Wordpress Website Design & Development
Fission recently worked with Chesapeake Waterkeepers to design and develop a website for their initiative, Fair Farms Maryland. Fair Farms Maryland brings together a diverse group of constituents to pursue its mission of creating a sustainable food system in the state of Maryland. The goal of the site was to serve as a hub for information regarding issues around food sustainability, as well as a place where constituents could take action and become more involved in the movement for a healthier food system. Since the folks over at Fair Farms Maryland were to be the main content creators for the site, it was important to create a site that 1) would be user-friendly in terms of adding and editing content, and 2) would be flexible enough to sustain growth and diversity of content. Scroll down to below the Wordpress screenshots to see the website design mockups.
Wordpress Flexibility
We tackled the first of these priorities by creating a Wordpress back-end that has just the right amount of flexibility in terms of customizations and options not to underwhelm (or overwhelm) those adding content. Custom fields allowed for one page template to be used in a variety of ways. If no content is added to a field, the corresponding HTML section is simply not displayed, allowing for a large possible number of page layouts. We also created custom post types for “issues” so that these could appear throughout the site, but would be editable in a separate section of the Wordpress back-end, thereby separating them from generic posts and pages to avoid confusion.
The new Fair Farms Maryland website is fully-customizable in the Wordpress back-end. All menus, pages, blog posts, and content can be easily added, rearranged and moved. In addition, styling elements, such as background and text colors can be edited through the back-end too, allowing for flexibility in terms of design. All of the site templates followed this same model, which in the end makes interacting with the Wordpress back-end intuitive and not the frustrating experience that it could otherwise be!
Custom fields within Wordpress allow for flexibility and website growth without compromising aesthetics.
Custom post types allow for you to display content in multiple areas of your site, without having to edit them in multiple sections of your site.
Website Design
The homepage and basic page visually show you how we've incorporated the customizable custom fields and post types that we mentioned above as wordpres template modules to allow for a variety of distint-looking internal pages. On the homepage, the user can choose new slide images, replace issue blocks (which they can change the main color, icon, and text for inside the custom post type for "issues"), modify the image and text for the call to action banner, and choose whether or not to display a Twitter banner above the footer.
The basic page template shows all the differernt modules that we designed and developed for internal pages for the Fair Farms website. These modules can be turned on/off on any basic page which allows for internal pages to put the content first, and the design second. Each of these sections is customizable in the backend using custom fields to allow for the most flexibility on the client-side as they fill out their new website. Scroll down to see the basic page template.
