Louisville Urban League (Live site)

Louisville Urban League – built on Joomla. This is one of the first Joomla sites that I’ve been able to see from start to finish using the system. I help maintain a number of other sites built on Joomla, and while I’ve upgraded and added on to those sites, I didn’t create the original versions. So this project was a really good chance to get into the nitty gritty of putting a Joomla installation to work. I even got it to validate (CSS 2/XHTML 1.0). Unfortunately, as tends to happen with CMS sites, I’m sure it won’t validate forever once a lot of new content is added, but that’s OK.

Some neat things on this site include fully customizable (by the client) sidebars – I tend to code most sites with hardcoded sidebars to limit the amount of room possible to break away from the design. And absolutely no offense to the clients, but they’re coming to me because of my experience in providing that structure or design. This site is one of the rare cases where I felt that there was a knowledgeable team that could take care of any of those content changes as well as keep a consistent layout.

The LUL can also accept form data that they set up themselves through the CMS. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a plugin that I coded myself, but it will work well for them. If they choose, an individual form’s input can be saved to an excel file, CSV, or other options.

One note about this site – I had more design revisions on this site than any other site I’d worked on at the time. The original designs were a bit more dynamic and had a little bit more “pop” (boss’ word, not mine) in my opinion. But hey, as long as the client is happy, right? I included one of the earlier (but not the first) designs below.

CSS Validation (LUL.org)

XHTML validation (lul.org)

an earlier version of lul.org