The Project

As a freelance project, I designed and developed a dedicated website for the Appledore Island Migration Station on Appledore Island, Maine.

The Problem

The banding station's online presence was limited to a couple of faculty pages on a university website, designed for banding station volunteers. As a result, the information was difficult to locate and difficult for banding station staff to keep updated. Furthermore, the station had no public-facing online presence that might serve to attract potential new volunteers and supporters.

The Approach

I started by interviewing the head bander to gather information about her goals for the new site and then expanded the research to include all banding station volunteers. I then sketched out a proposed site map, created several style tiles showing some options for the visual treatment of the site, and worked with the head bander to finalize the style tile. Once the design was finalized, I developed the site using WordPress as the CMS.

Development Details

I used the following techniques to develop the site:

• Custom pages were created for the home page, daily report landing page, individual daily report pages, season Banding Summary page, and Banding Station Staff page.
• Custom post types were created for home page news items, staff scheduler and staff profiles.
• Custom fields were created (using the Advanced Custom Fields plugin) for the daily reports, volunteer schedule, staff profiles, and home page photo gallery.
• The image slider was programmed using PHP to access the photo gallery custom field and populate the images, and using JQuery to run the animation.
• The Season Banding Summary page, which is created dynamically, was programmed using PHP.

The site was launched in May 2016.

Live site

Github repo

The Result

The features of the new website include:

• engaging content to attract and retain site visitors, including images and updates of banding activity during banding seasons
• general information about the station and the research being conducted
• scheduling and logistical information for station volunteers
• the use of Wordpress as a CMS to make it easy to add and update content

My Role

Solo project: I did all design and development work.