Kent Poker Society
Website
This year I was elected as president of the Kent Poker Society, a society of which I have been an active member of for the last four years. The society was being completely re-branded this year, and as a result called for a completely new design for the website.
I came up with a top-down view theme, which used common poker objects such as poker chips and playing cards, and created a website which was clean, accessible and informative. The vast majority of the Kent Poker Societys members use services such as Facebook and Twitter, so the new website needed to integrate with these third-party services seamlessly in order to better reach our target audience.
A Facebook page was set up for the Kent Poker Society which people could become a fan of, enabling them to receive updates from the society on Facebook. I integrated this with Twitter, automatically tweeting posts from the Facebook page to the Kent Poker Society Twitter account enabling twitter users to be kept up to date as well. In addition, the website itself pulls the latest tweets from twitter feed and re-publishes them to the news ticker, keeping the sites visitors up to date as well. By using this method, all three services are able to keep completely in-sync with one another, without the need to republish the same content manually for each service.
In addition to using Facebook and Twitter third-party services, I decided to use Flickr as a means to host the photos from the Kent Poker Society. Using their API, I then created an image gallery on the Kent Poker Society website, which automatically pulled all the photo albums and images from Flickr eliminating the need to manually update the website with the photos, as was the case with the previous version of the site.
This year, the Kent Poker Society was selling official merchandise to its members, and wanted an easy and efficient way for orders to be placed and payment taken. Using PayPal as an e-commerce solution, the site is able to take payment for Kent Poker Society merchandise.
