I joined the Suffolk LIT Lab in January 2024 to help scale the LIT Lab’s Document Assembly Line project (here’s a welcome post on the Suffolk University website). I love the job, not least because I get to employ my web development and design skills as part of it.
Shortly after I joined, the LIT Lab got a new logo and we decided to start a blog. That meant moving off of the scratch-built website David Colarusso built with vanilla HTML to a shiny new WordPress website. There is nothing wrong with vanilla HTML, and I loved the no-nonsense aesthetic of the old website. We just needed something a bit easier to update, and I think the marketing department was eager for the LIT Lab’s website to be a bit more closely aligned with the university’s brand guidelines.
The priorities were:
- Migrate the content from the old website
- Create a new design with the new logo, Suffolk’s colors, and a complementary font
- Redirect URLs from 7 years of online projects
- Don’t let it take too much time from my other projects
Apart from the colors and font, the design is largely inherited from the base theme I built that I use for all my projects. Everyone at the LIT Lab needs to be able to maintain this website, so I avoided complex layouts. (I like the WordPress block editor, but the more nested elements the more difficult it is for someone to edit, add, or remove things without breaking the layout.)
For the child theme I put the most work into customizing the header to take advantage of the new logo and reflect the Suffolk University website. I also built custom Javascript for a table of contents and to include an email newsletter signup form on the blog.
I think the result shows how even just a few key customizations can result in a unique and great-looking website!