We were fortunate enough to have been chosen to re-design the Colorado TU website late last year. This was a special opportunity for me as I am heavily involved in the group and I felt honored to have been chosen.

Design Brief

The old site was a major obstacle in quickly pushing out updates to the more than 10,000 members across the state. I learned this from personal experience and decided it was time for an update. I approached the President and Vice President over drinks with my ideas in hand. It didn’t take much to convince them the work was needed and we were quickly under contract and moving towards a final design.

The best thing about the site is the integration of Chapter feeds from across the state.

Before Shot

The old site was trying hard to operate like a blog but was not doing a good job of highlighting important articles and posts. I quickly came up with the idea that the state site needs to operate like a Communication Hub for its members. The homepage should include all of the news that is happening throughout Colorado in a easy to read, quick format.

The Solution

Once I had some clear direction and really understood what the problems were on the site, I focused in on the home page. I knew this page was going to be the most critical component of the entire site.

We added a rotating slider image that I custom designed to include oversized imagery and links to important articles. We also added an action center across the top of the site to focus vistors to areas Colorado TU needs help now. The site includes a lot of custom jquery which hides and displays content on the fly. The overall look is pretty cool. The site is constantly in motion.

Building the Hub

The best thing about the site is the integration of Chapter feeds from across the state. Now when a Chapter leader makes a post the Colorado TU site grabs the feed and displays it right on the homepage. This means Trout Unlimited members can quickly see what’s happening in Colorado. The homepage acts like a news aggregator and delivers on the promise of a statewide communication Hub.

Other Features

This site is so packed with cool features I’m probably going to have to revisit it with another post. The Event Calendar is a nice touch and allows visitors to see whats coming up.

The Drop Down Navigation is pretty slick too. It uses WordPress’s 3.0 Menu System with custom code to allow for the drop downs. This means the Colorado TU staff can manually update the page links without any assistance from a Web Developer, saving them the costs and time of hiring a Web Developer. Not to mention it looks fantastic on the site.

The site is also hooked up to Authorize.net to allow credit card processing. This will allow Colorado TU to accept registrations for events and take donations all from the website.

Overall this is one of the most ambitious site’s we have ever taken on. We were honored to do the design and feel like we took this site and the organization as a whole into a new direction.