The DDGP approached me to redesign their website and create a logo for the organisation. Their existing WordPress website, never reached its full potential.

The logo

I am not often asked to do branding projects so it's a lovely opportunity when I get to do one. Before starting on the website I created the logo. It was challenging as the DDGP has a very long organisation name. The client also want a strap line included and on the first few version the strap line almost took up more space than the logo. We went through several ideas and iterations.

The final result is a fairly large logo, but it's clean and contains all the elements for someone to get a good idea of the aim of the organisation.

The website

Designing the website was more familiar territory. I have been reading a lot about grids in the past year and for this website I challenged myself to be a bit more adventurous and use a grid based on the Golden Ratio.

Functionality

The website itself has several core functions. The main one is to inform interested people on what school governors do and how to become one. To support this the DDGP offers a series of courses, training events and packages for schools. There is also a section for downloadable resources, some only viewable if you are a member.

Membership

I used the out-of-the-box WordPress user accounts to create a membership section for the resources. There is no plugin, only standard WordPress functions to create the sign in/out functionality.

Calendar

The calendar of events was more complicated to create. The courses and training events are all custom posts and the calendar pulls out the dates of each one and assembles it back together into a calendar. Again no plugin was used, but it did involve a lot of custom PHP. I choose deliberately not to use a plugin because all of the ones I looked at never quite did what I required.