Ida Rask

Game Programmer

Menu

Ida Rask

Game Programmer

Kulttuuribussi

Team:

Me | Web Developer

Sirumilla Kotilainen | Designer

Project Description

Kulttuuribussi is a website created for city of Kotka's children's culture center's project called also Kulttuuribussi. The Kulttuuribussi project's goal is to bring culture directly to children and their families throughtout Kotka and enable cultural experiences for those families who don't have the opportunity to access art institutions or cultural experiences. Every child has the right to art and culture, and the project tries to strengthen this right.

The first version of the website was done by me and art by Sirumilla, but the site has changed a bit since we left the project and I don't know who's in charge of the current look of the site.

My part

My job was to be in charge of the technical implementation of the site and Siru was supposed to design the layout and color palette, and do some art, but aside from the art, we designed everything together. We didn't get much from the client side, all they wanted was a, "colorful and fun, like a children's book", unique website targeted to children and their families. In the beginning of the project we worked quite closely with the client and had meetings every week or two but then they got so busy with the project that they kind of left us hanging on our own. Little by little we were told not to implement some features and in the end, the website got left unfinished because we didn't get any content despite several queries.

Process

  • We started the designing process from the color palette and tried to go with the children's book-like look but the client didn't like it so we continued with straight up white background and some color in footer, header and fonts. What comes to the font, they wanted something bolded and fun so I found Luckiest Guy. Then they wanted colorful texts (whatever that means, they didn't know either) so we started to experiment with the site logo and the navigation buttons and ended up using the multi-colored text in some of the headers in the site.
  • What comes to the technical side of the site, I hadn't worked with WordPress before, only coded pages myself so it felt really hard at first and I swore I would never use WordPress again (little did I know..) but actually WordPress is really simple, basically just drag and drop the type of boxes you need and it does almost everything else by itself. I did do some changes to the CSS, though, to improve the responsiveness.
  • At first there was a discussion about an "ad banner" on top of the page to show upcoming events but apparently making custom sized banners was too much work so we replaced it with a carousel that has pictures of some children playing.
  • The client also wanted the website to be "in sync" with their social media so I researched some social media plugins and tested them with my own socials because I didn't have access to theirs. When I finally told them the plugin is ready to just sign in with their credentials it too was apparently too difficult and they scratched the whole idea.