Chris Wells

One of the more com­plex web design pro­jects I’ve recently been involved with is this “site in a box” Drupal int­all­a­tion pro­file for the Trans­ition Town move­ment. Check their map for a sense of the num­ber of our poten­tial clients.

Latest update: Less than a week after upload­ing these visu­als to this site, I dis­covered that a group of Trans­ition­Town volun­teers in the US had the exact-same idea to develop a “site in a box” Drupal instance for any trans­ition ini­ti­at­ive. So our UK team imme­di­ately joined up to the Trans­ition­Drupal group on drupal.org and since then we’ve been devel­op­ing the concept together with a steadily-increasing cohort of internta­tional volun­teers. It’s prob­ably the most excit­ing pro­ject I’ve ever been involved with.

After a fair bit of work in my spare time, I finally fin­ished the first set of wire­frame visu­als for Trans­ition Kensal to Kilburn’s new web­site. In the spirit of com­munity col­lab­or­a­tion, I decided I would copy the Open Design approach Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt used when redevel­op­ing the Drupal site. This is the first full set of visu­als and any­one can review them and provide feed­back. As you’ll see, I got a little car­ried away and ended up also doing an ini­tial look-and-feel for the whole thing! So I’m inter­ested in your thoughts on the way they look, the lay­out, nav­ig­a­tion, wid­gets, tools, icons, everything!

We plan to phase our devel­op­ment of the site into most-likely three dis­tinct phases, which reflect the devel­op­ing require­ments of a typ­ical Trans­ition Ini­ti­at­ive from the Mulling stage all the way to a fully-fledged social network.

Phase 1 – Embark (mulling)

• Home & My dashboard
• Basic con­tent & wide con­tent page
• Groups list­ing & Group page
• Projects/Land share list­ings & pages
• Events list­ing & event page
• News list­ing & Story (blog)
• Dis­cus­sion threads list­ing & Thread

Phase 2 – Mature

• Links dir­ect­ory
• Photo album list­ing, Photo album & Photo page
• Video list­ing & Video page

Phase 3 – Social network

• Mem­bers list­ing & User profile

You’ll see we don’t have a logo yet but we should have one quite soon –  I’m going into my local school, QPCS, to work with the GCSE design stu­dents to develop one. So far it’s going really well!

I also have some spe­cific plans for them­ing, including:

• Use “Color Mod­ule Next Gen­er­a­tion” mod­ule to allow any ini­ti­at­ive to install the theme and then recon­fig­ure the col­ours of most objects to match their needs.
• Use Zen or Fusion theme as a base, allow­ing me to integ­rate some of their advanced fea­tures quickly, without much devel­op­ment work (spe­cific­ally  Skinr mod­ule, 960.gs integ­ra­tion and vari­ous other tools).
• Attempt to sup­port IE6 as well as the full range of mod­ern browsers. How­ever, since IE6 is dwind­ling in pop­ular­ity, I’m less keen to provide com­pre­hens­ive support.

Tech­nor­ati: design, drupal, trans­ition, ttmvt, web­site