Project: Van der Vinnestraat website

Not every street has its own
website... but the Van der Vinnestraat has one.

It is an idea we had during the street BBQ. In fact, it has nothing to do with photography, but the idea came after I said it would be nice to join the pictures we took during the party with the street's history, which has been collected by one of our neighbors.

She made a nice book, with old pictures and the original street planning she got at the city hall. Also the history of the Jewish families who had lived here and unfortunately had been arrested and killed on the concentration camps. Some sad moments but also lots of good moments!

I am happy to have the site concept ready. It took me a while to produce it because I decided to study a bit and exercise the concepts I've got on the webdesign books. I keep asking myself if I would like to earn my bread from website developing.

I have no problems with the technical side of it. I can learn the technical things very quickly. My question comes always from the design part: I am not trained to be creative with form, which imposes a lot of trial and error. Sometimes I was pinching the hair in my head, one by one, literally. I felt like someone who has the arms tied around the body. But as I said on another post, we will never learn if we don't try. And try and try... and again try.

I am happy with the initial results. The site has a photography page (and that was the meaning of all the initiative right?), a newsletter module and a dynamic managed content. I can teach someone else to maintain the contents of the website and populate the history pages.

I have avoided Flash usage, which means that any mortal can open the site from IPhone or IPad. I have used a bit of Java for the picture module (sigplus has been used). The idea is very clean, with a clear navigation and triadic color combination (thanks to Adobe Kuler!).

As a lesson for the next website: I feel quite immobilized by the Joomla design of banner+menu+contents. The usage of Artisteer helps a lot with the initial template concept. For the next website, I will generate the main CSS stylesheet with Artisteer and later on, change the template a bit to move the items around the page: a vertical menu, a dynamic banner or no banner at all!

I would like to think a bit out of the box, and use the technology to implement my ideas. For now, it works the other way around: the technology drives my creative instinct.

But I am on the good path though!