From The Developer

Written By Nicholas Culbert

This is a test/draft article, to check that the layout is correct and the artcle looks as intended.

“Can you hear me, can you see me?”
— Okay Megan & x Golden Fox x

Hello. It is me, Elliot.

My trusty Lenovo Thinkpad and I have been hard at work navigating Squarespace on these few days I’ve had an uneventful calendar! Lets have a look at what I’ve done, in order:

  • Meeting with Nick:

    Given the go ahead to make Dragonslayers a new website. Asked for details, to make appropriate branding guide.
    I found Nick a great code to get a year of Squarespace for 50% off! Take that previous hosting costs!

  • Set up a Trello board:

    A kanban board, like Trello’s, is used mainly by web developers, to ensure you can continually track updates on websites that are frequently updating. I however, think they’re amazing devices to use for any kind of project because they’re quick to update, easy to view, accessible by the entire team etc.

The autism’s want for data is very happy!

  • Designed the Home Page within 24 hours:

    Having played with a draft idea over 2-3 days before our first meeting, I had already put the work into researching the industry standard for websites across military companies and designed a concept I felt aligned with their message and branding.
    So it was extremely quick for me to transfer that Squarespace draft to the new website, tweaking and changing information based off the document of text Nick & Mike wrote for me.

There was a few bits of design that I needed to do such as creating iconography, making high definition thumbnail, changing the favicon (the little image on the left of the website tab), adapting the logo to have a horizontal version etc.

  • Brief check from Nick:

    I got Nick to have a quick peek at the overall feel/layout - as there was no point me carrying on with the other website pages if he didn’t like the path it was taking.

  • Did all the legal research:

    For the Terms of Use (we call it Terms of Service over here) and the Privacy Policy, I had to do a quick check of USA cookie laws, any miltary/weapon laws, third party policies etc. Then built the pages, so I don’t forget them later on.

  • About Us / Contact Us pages:

    It was just more laying things out, editing approved images to match the theme better, checking mobile layout vs desktop layout, picking imagery and text from the approved document. I even had to make a LinkedIn account so I could check that the links directed to the team! Poor buggers probably got loads of notifcations that “Elliot Miles from Weston-super-Mare” had viewed their profile.

    For the first time in this process I implemented code: having to use only HTML to create the create the contact form “message recieved” message. It was frustrating to not separate style with CSS but completely doable - after I had already sent myself over 8 contact forms across desktop/mobile website after the HTML code failed the sending of the form.. <style></style> was the bain of my existence for a solid 2 hours.

    I’m nothing if not fastidious!

  • SEO Check:

    At this point it was worth renaming files to match, checking the slugs (.com/about-us) were all correct, and seeing how I could improve the SEO of the website - Squarespace actually has an AI bot to help you implent this. So it helped me write simple meta-data alt image captions, add meta-data captions for Google, and telling me what needs improving (most of which I can’t do until I get the final clearance).

    Something I didn’t know, which I immediately deisgned, was an FAQ page will actually improve SEO - makes sense when you spend 0.5 seconds thinking about it! Replaced Media page with FAQ in the footer as the contact us page mentions media.

  • Now?:

    I’m experimenting with this current News Article page… but otherwise? There’s not much more for me to do until Nick and team check they’re happy with it/decide stock imagery.


    I could do the technology page but that requires a potential complete reshift of the home page/I’d want more images of the actual reticle/scope.

    I could also just make sure the branding guide is up to date / as clean as possible and get that sent over… Though I should wait until it’s all been tested before I get that sent.

So that’s all for now!

Elliot.

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Nicholas Culbert