Wildtierrettung Rhein-Berg

Motivation

I was asked if I could help creating a website for this animal rescue organisation, which focuses on saving wild animals before fields are harvested. Since I love animals and adore the cause, it was easy to say yes.

Description

The requirements were easy but vague. They had a website before, but had lost access to it. The aim of my work was:

• Create a represantable website, that focusses on a few key points
  • It needs to inform about the the organisation and their work
  • It needs to communicate why they do what they do
  • It needs to show, how people can help (becoming a member or donate)
  • It needs to communicate to the farmers, why they should call the organisation before harvesting and give them an easy way to do so
• They needed email
• They needed a contact form

Fortunately my girlfriend did a lot of work on this website, too. Mainly organising the structure and content, research the topics and create content, research SEO keywords and implementing a solid SEO foundation.

We also had access to a lot of great photos, which helped a lot.

I did the design and the technical implementation. That’s what I do best.

Design Details

There were no requirements. It had to be simple, look modern and semi-professional, as in: Not too playful, but also not too corporate. They had a logo and an active social media account, so I had a few things to work with.

We decided to focus on the content. That is what this website is about in the end. I started setting up a basic theme using our (dare I say fantastic) UI Design Tool.

We went with a few mini themes and color coded some sections of the website. Most of the colors are light shades so they don’t distract from the content. We went with a simple and clean font, big enough font sizes and a bit of white space.

It really took me a lot of iterations. I was hard to please and my design knowledge is not the best, but I learned a lot and I’m happy with the result.

My key takeaways are:

• Less really is more. Overcomplicating things and a fear of “too boring” is not necessary and does not any value
• I really like the “on this page” links. I think they give a good overview and make the page more accessible
• Before starting this project I was very keen on a specific type scale. In the end, I tweaked it a lot and went with less mathematical coherence and more “this looks right”
• I learned a valuable lesson about “good enough”. Perfect is probably not achievable and definitely not necessary. It turned out great and that is enough.

Technical Details

There is very little to say about the technical side of this.

I still love astro. It’s fast and simple and close enough to HTML, CSS and a sprinkle of JSX. Their image integration does exactly what I want and for the rest, it just gets out of the way.

I’m about to extract hardcoded values for reusability, I can type anything I want and sprinkling in a bit of JS is easy enough.

Conclusion

That’s it really. Some webmaster things were required: Setting up E-Mail and a contact form, setting up a domain and hosting. I had an interesting experience, because we had to go through a domain reseller, but that worked out to be surprisingly painless.

All in all it felt good to build this and do something for a good cause. Working on it and working with the people was fun and we achieved a good result.