LessFuss Design

Chequers Playgroup was one of the first sites I did when I started freelancing in 2007. At the time I was one of the Committee members, so I took care of the site content and kept everything up to date. Recently the Committee members asked me to update the site so they could look after it themselves now I’m no longer a member. And because I can’t help myself sometimes, I also tinkered with the design…

The Chequers Vice-Chair already looks after several WordPress sites, so it made sense to use WordPress for Chequers as it’s a platform she’s comfortable with (and easy for new site editors to pick up). All the existing site pages were converted into WordPress pages, and a blog added so the Committee can add news items quickly and easily.

The only thing (temporarily) sacrificed was the image gallery, which used the excellent HighSlide JS image thumbnail viewer to have a slideshow of photos. There is a HighSlide WordPress plugin so I’ll be taking a look at implementing this in order to get the photos of the children and their work back onto the site.

To be honest I never felt the site design was properly finished to start with, so I also spent a bit of time adding a bit more depth to the background imagery used, and tidying up some of the page elements I felt had been a bit rushed first time around (e.g. new styling for the contact us form). I also decided to change the layout from fluid to fixed width, which overcame issues of high-detail images overlapping.

For the design I was once again very grateful for the Bittbox high resolution watercolour brushes , also to Romina Chamorro for the neat set of handrawn doodles (used in the top tabs) and to ‘chokingonstatic’ for the hand-drawn stars used down the side of the main content column.

The font for headings and the navigation (implemented using Typeface JS font replacement) uses the Nilland font from Manfred Klein , a lovely slab serif font that fitted the bill perfectly.

Have a look around by visiting chequersplaygroup.co.uk .