Due to technical glitches with Hostgator over the past week, progress has been slow on the coding side. I have re-started the GHF homepage several times, trying various themes and approaches. Due to hosting conflicts with required plugins, I am unable to continue coding the theme I have chosen, Pytheas, so I have decided to code the site from a subfolder on my personal domain and move it to the GHF site once it is completed. In the meantime, I will have to convince the client to move their domain to a host that will support this theme (I have installed and tested the theme and all required plugins on another host and it works perfectly there). Since my personal domain is in the midst of a transfer to Blue Host, all web coding is on hold but it seems likely it will be back up in a few days.
Originally, I had decided to take a more agile development approach and wireframe as I was coding. I felt that this would be better suited to illustrating to the client exactly what the site will look like. This pause in development has provided a nice opportunity to prepare some more detailed wireframes. This is the wireframe I have prepared for the homepage.
As you can see, my wireframes are a pretty basic interpretation of the structural elements of the theme, but this was useful in determining how the client wants the content to be structured and for placement of specially requested items (eg. the client asked to have double-navigation — a second navigation bar at the uppermost portion of the screen, just above the logo).
I shared some more refinements of the logo with the client last week. They liked #2 the best, which is the one I liked the best as well. I was instructed to further refine #2 and to provide final comps with more color and typographic approaches.
Aside from the domain hosting glitches, the project is on schedule. I am aiming to have the logo completed in the next week, and the basic framework of the site built for the end of the quarter. I predict that I will be refining the site into next quarter, which the client is okay with as they are still working on creating content.
Leanne Padgett 