EDGE Website
The process for designing and building a new website for EDGE.
The process for designing and building a new website for EDGE.
While working for EDGE, Sheridan’s Entrepreneurship Discovery & Growth Engine, me and a team of designers and developers were given the task of designing a new brand identity and website for EDGE. The website needed to support dynamic content that could be easily updated by members of the EDGE team.
The final product consisted of a website with 11 unique pages. Each page contains its own set of custom illustrations and iconography that align with EDGE’s visual identity and help the company tell its story.
EDGE is a community of people that is dedicated to supporting impact entrepreneurship. Their goal is to help people and small businesses develop solutions that are equitable and sustainable. It was important for EDGE that their website felt inclusive, fun and modern to its users, all while retaining the brand identity it had already established.
Pulling from some of EDGE’s existing assets we began to create a set of visuals to incorporate on the new website. Our goal was to keep everything light and playful so we made sure to include lots of whimsical imagery and make use of EDGE’s vibrant secondary palette.
We began the process by first designing some prototypes within XD. At this stage of the process we were collecting and organizing all the content that would be displayed on the pages. We needed to make sure that we gave each section and appropriate amount of space and that the design still worked if the content changed later on.
With the content ready to go we began incorporating branded visuals into the design. The high fidelity prototypes were analyzed and tested by the EDGE team. Many iterations were made over the course of several weeks before the project was ready for development.
Disclaimer: The following image has muted colors to reduce file size (Webflow doesn't like images over 4mb)
Because we were creating a custom template from scratch, we needed to code all the front end elements ourselves. We used HTML & CSS to layout and style our elements and some JavaScript to handle some of the dynamic interactions that the site had to offer.
To fetch & deliver content from and to our WordPress database we needed to use some PHP in our code. This was crucial because it ensures that when the copy on the site needed to be updated it could be done through WordPress exclusively.
We used Bootstrap to help speed up the process of building the website. The premade classes Bootstrap offers made making the website responsive much easier and quicker.
We chose WordPress to house the content on our website. Wordpress has a simple to use interface that allows content on the website to be easily updated by EDGE's users.
Our target users for this website were entrepreneurs and Sheridan students with an entrepreneurial interest. We knew this was a group of people who were no strangers to fast paced environments and who valued their time so we needed to make sure that the navigation was quick and information was palatable and could be understood. We encouraged the EDGE team to keep the copy concise where possible.
We also needed to keep in mind that the website would be actively updated by members of the EDGE team that weren’t as technically familiar with website development, so it was vital we created a template that was simple to follow and remained visually cohesive as the content changed. We made sure that all the input forms within WordPress were properly labeled and tested each page for responsiveness with different content types.
With some additional iterations the website was finally live. It is currently actively being used by members of the EDGE team and their clients.
Below is a highlight of some of the pages I got to work on as well as a link to their animated 404 page that was done by me.
Working at EDGE gave me a-lot of experience in a diverse array of design oriented roles. I designed digital and physical products in the form of posters, social media graphics, infographics, user-interfaces, websites and even some company swag. I look back fondly at the people I've met and friends I've made who have all taught me a tremendous amount about being a team player and making the best quality work that I can. Im excited to use the skills I've acquired and share the stories I've gained, in my future endeavours!
