WEBSITE WORK
I have a great deal of experience working with websites. My competencies include creation/design, editing, content, IA, SEO, statistics, intermedial synergy, usability, target group identification, graphics/photos and HTML and CSS editing.
From the examples below, you might get a sense of my work
The Danish College of General Practitioners
When I was introduced to the website DSAM, it already ran on Drupal CMS. It was obvious that it had been neglected for years. The website was to be thoroughly renovated and relaunched. My primary task was to create the front page graphics.
My initial step was to create a new colour scheme. My source of inspiration was the DSAM poster containing the College’s Seven Reference Points.
The colour shades of the poster connote professionalism and calmness and are a modern interpretation of the blue colour associated with medicine. The warm, subdued blue colours are associated with credibility, reliability and commitment. Blue is the colour of communication and in addition, one of the most gender-neutral of all colours. Conversely, the cold blue and blue-green colours are associated with insensitivity and detachment. I chose, however, to replace the dark, kerosene green and move toward a more subdued and uniform blue-green colour scale.
The most important graphics on a website is the front page graphics. It is the user’s first important encounter with the site, so it is vital to get the connotations right.
I prepared three graphic design proposals, each with the key element of either cubes, puzzle pieces or couples dancing.
X number of stacked cubes should indicate that you build something, create a structure, build upon, construct, co-construct, something multifaceted, leverage, solidity.
The puzzle pieces should evoke the concept of diagnosing (aggregate symptoms), the biopsychosocial approach (human beings are complex creatures and must be considered an indivisible whole), solving something, seeing the bigger picture.
The couple dancing should connote the performance of a GP’s work as a dance, dance to the same tune, not stepping on toes, not wrestling, but dancing, interaction, cooperation.
As you can see, DSAM chose the front page graphics with the couples dancing, although not in the shades, I suggested.
General Practitioners Borups Allé 1
The homepage General Practitioners Borups Allé 1 is built in WordPress CMS. I designed the site for general practitioners Beich & Ehrenreich, and besides the requirement to incorporate the electronic patient portal, they essentially gave me a free hand both architecturally and design-wise. The underlying criteria for selecting the various features of the site stems from my commitment to make the site appear professional, but not elitist, inviting, but not populistic, personal, but not familiar, professionally reliable, but not lofty. The choices which I describe below, are made in accordance with these considerations.
Visually, I have focused on the clean, simple and stylish appearance of the site. This means, for example, that I have pursued a high degree of colour coordination – in images, graphic material, font colors, navigation menu, etc. The three mail colours throughout the site are:
I have only installed a very small number of plug-ins. The primary focus of these plug-in is usability and back-end functionality: One plug-in that contain a toolbox of powerful functions ranging from loading time optimization to detailed user statistics. Another, which enables the user to return to the top of the page in one click, a SEO plug-in and an import plug-in.
IA is always important on a website, but particularly on a very busy one at that; thousands of patients with varying degrees of digital literacy regularly use the site. After having experimented and processed feedback provided by patients, I arrived at the current structure.
Menopause – better than its reputation
The website Menopause – better than its reputation is a combination of book PR and an online information and discussion platform.
When I became part of the process, author Lotte Hvad had already set up a website with CMS WordPress, but she had not completed the work. Furthermore, she was dissatisfied with the layout and theme.
The website is a result of a close collaboration between the author (and former GP and Vice-Chair of The Danish Council on Ethics) and myself. Lotte Hvad had a clear position with regard to all aspects of the website construction. As always, when the customer and the supplier work so closely together, the process has been a meditation of the customer’s wishes and my own ideas about what might work from an overall perspective. We didn’t alway dance to the same tune, but we never stepped on each other’s toes.
We soon agreed on the colour scheme. The book cover is a clear orange-red. This shade and the slightly darker orange-red shade are often used in the context of feminism and debate books, which is in line with the book’s theme and message. The rest of the site is black and white – including the logo and the header photos, responding to the desire that the site conveys professionalism and simplicity and the focus is on content and photos.
Initially,our opinions differed greatly.with regard to choice of photos. Lotte Hvad had taken some beautiful photos of the transitions in nature.
It was/still is my view that we already use too many euphemisms to describe menopausal women. One of the book’s points being that many of the problems we attribute to menopause are cultural contstructions, I felt it made sense to use photos of +50-year-old women’s bodies.
The key message of the book is presumedly the position that even though one should not ignore the negative challenges that may derive from menopause, it does give rise, however, to many positive possibilities. The photos of “transitional women” should, thus, communicate empowerment, contemplation, reflection and commitment.
Be Pretty Please
The blog Be Pretty Please is built in my favorite CMS: WordPress. It is a relatively simpel site that is structured around the three communication genres, I use on the blog: articles, blog posts and quotes.
At the top of the front page, I have placed a gallery slideshow showcasing selected (article) blog posts. The transition of the selected blogposts can easily be replaced by rotating header images. I have laid a fair amount of emphasis on the aspect of movement on this site, as its main purpose is information and discussions on political and social issues. “In tranquillo mors – in fluctu vita.” (“Stillness is death, movement is life”).
Below the gallery slideshow, my blogposts (which are the site’s cornerstone) are displayed in a card based blog design.
I have created the pages “Articles”, “Blogposts” and “Quotes” as category pages using the menu feature, which enables me to assign the blogpost to their respective menu item in one simple click.
For various reason, I have used quite a lot of time editing the php and css codes. For example, the theme primarily uses English terms. I wasn’t keen on the very girlish pink colour of the theme either, why I replaced it with a dark neon pink. Furthermore, the theme had a side footer that I wanted to get rid of.
It is quite laborious to edit the php and css codes of this theme, but in my view it was well worth the effort, as I ultimately got exactly the result, I wanted.
Danish Seed Health Centre
Danish Seed Health Centre website is built in the SiteCore CMS. The Danish Seed Health Centre for Developing Countries is a research centre that collaborates with scientists worldwide to find sustainable ways to achieve a high level of seed health. In the short term, the Centre works to further the production of nutritionally healthy crops of resource-poor farmers in the third world. In the long term, the Centre’s mission is to help eradicate poverty. The research centre is part of University of Copenhagen, which has a very tight design manual effectively putting my creative skills to the test. If asked to single out a specific element of the site that I am especially proud of, I would probably go with the front page photo of the sunflower and the Centre’s logo (a seed).
