It’s been a busy week for me at work. I’m always; busy, but at least I’ve enjoyed the past month of my busyness at my business. I’m about 3/4 of the way through camps.lifeteen.com and I’m really enjoying it. I wanted the project to only last three weeks, but that was derailed when the camp directors didn’t get me their content on time. Plus, I have plenty of responsibilities at the studio I have to do for a few hours each day. But since I’m having fun with this site, I don’t mind taking more time.

It’s been exciting to work on camps.lifeteen.com because I get a chance to be creative. My first priority is to give the site visitor a chance to understanding of all three of our camp facilities. So if a Youth Minister is interested in taking their youth group to camp, they know what each camp can uniquely offer.; So I have plenty of pictures and information about where you will stay, what buildings you can use, and what you can do while you are at camp. Most people would have been pleased with the site if I did this and I did it well. But there is so much material about camps that I can work with, so I’ve decided to go all out.

I believe it’s important to create a sense of regionalism. Each camp is in a unique part of the country, and it is what around the camps that help defines the camp itself. For instance, camp RockyVine is close the Missouri River in the wine region of the Midwest. It’s one thing to tell people this, but it’s another thing to show them with maps.

Earlier this week I used Adobe Illustrator to make a graph that showed the difference in elevation from a specific camp and the closest city. I was shocked to see that our Arizona camp was three times higher elevation than our camp in Georgia. But once; you see it on a graph, you don’t really believe it. I’m not going to overdo it, but if there are other chances to educate people with graphs, I’ll be happy to do it.

One problem I’ve seen is that many people judge a camp as if it were a low-budge vacation destination. In all honesty, some of the photos of our cabins aren’t very flattering. It’s basically shelter from the elements. To get skeptics to think bigger, I’m trying to get them excited to be in the wild. I am flirting with is to have a wildlife page for each of our three summer camps where we educate people on the regional odd-ball plants and animals. It could be educating and amusing to see photos of local critters that you might run into while you are at camp. I talked to Adam, and I think that it would be cool to go the next level and and make a sound bird where you can click on an animal and here it make it’s sound. Win you hear a pack of coyotes howl, you can’t help but want to go to Arizona.

The way a web design project goes is a series of problems followed by delightful solutions. I’ve been at this long enough to know that I will eventually find a cool solution to every design problem, but sometimes the solution doesn’t come as quickly as I’d like.

I knew that I wanted to use a lot of high quality photos because they do the best job in telling the story of the camp. But after clicking through one of the camp sections; that is finished, I realized that the photos were overwhelming. Plus, it looked clunky and lopsided to have a one paragraph description and then six photos.

So yesterday afternoon I decided to do replace the tall column of photos with a tidy click through Flash slide show. It will be more fun to click through the photos than to scroll down, plus it adds a little flare to the site. Some designers would avoid a slide show because it’s been done so many times. But it works well and that’s enough for me. Another advantage of the Flash photos is that it will anchor each page because it is the first thing that grabs your attention when you load the page. The gentle transitions between photos will also help set the pace for using the site.

So here I am on a Saturday morning, and I’ve spent the last hour typing about work over the past week. I guess it’s official: I’m having fun at work again.