LessFuss Design

The second charity site I’ve worked on recently (the other being the Green Light Trust site) is a small website for the Hempnall Trust, a charity in my village that gives grants to those in the parish experiencing need, hardship or distress.

The Trustees wanted a simple website to promote the work they do and to allow people to contact them with enquiries, and they wanted something they could manage themselves. And that’s what they got.

The site is built using WordPress, so managing page content and adding news items (using the blog side of WordPress) is a breeze for the Trustees. At a low cost they now have something they can keep up to date themselves, without forking out a fortune for a Web Guy to make small changes.

For the design – a typical view over the corn fields around the village (the storm clouds are typical too) – I used the indespensable Bittbox Hi-res Watercolour Photoshop brushes, building it up layer by layer to add some depth.

I also used the brushes to create the Hempnall map, and used Highslide JS – to my knowledge the most accessible lightbox image viewer – to get the pseudo pop up window on the homepage of the site. I didn’t use it myself this time around, but there’s also a Highslide JS WordPress plugin which you might find useful.

Finally, the Trustees wanted some options for visitors to the site who might want to change the appearance of the page. I made the ‘Page options’ using Brothercake’s Invasion of the Body Switchers, which uses javascript to change the active stylesheet instantly, without a page reload. I used this to provide default, large text and high contrast options for visitors.

To take a look around, pop along to www.hempnall-trust.org.uk.