I’ve been designing for The Wrecking Ball Fight Facility for a number of years now. As the sport gained mainstream attention and the demand of it’s students or potential students began to change, wreckemall.com had to evolve to those needs. To keep costs down I could no longer be “on call” to make changes to the site. I decided a Wordpress blog would best suit their needs for announcements on the home page and the powerful Wordpress page editing capabilities would be a perfect way for them to keep all of the information up-to-date themselves.
In the beginning we really tried to create a rough/grungy look that was not unlike other operations offering the same thing, but there had to be key elements that were a bit more interesting. We took a lot of cues from things like horror movie posters and skateboard graphics. We even sought inspiration in old hardcore album covers. The creative direction was a success and people began to catch on to the “Wrecking Ball look”. We even put a lot of work into a clothing line called “Wreck Wear” but it was put to rest not only for the exhausting task of maintaining a clothing line but the extensive costs that go into printing t-shirts (even though I was knocking out the shirts with a heat transfer machine in my studio apartment.) The main focus then went into building the gym.
In short, after a year of opening in a small store front, it out grew itself, and had to move into a much larger warehouse space. With this move came higher costs so more investment dollars where at stake and the website had to take on a new look with simpler navigation to reach a broader base of potential students.
I had originally redesigned the site entirely in html having thought that I would be making all the edits. However those billable hours can start to add up quickly. It was then decided that a blogging platform and a simple content management system be put into place. I had heard that using Wordpress as a CMS was gaining in popularity so I did some research and brainstormed a way it could be implemented into the Wrecking Ball site, but what I didn’t want to do is lose the visual identity that was already established.
I arrived at this execution:
The blogging portion of the site is on the home page and displays only 1 post at time with commenting capabilities right below it . A simple list of past blog posts and a monthly archive list was all the archiving I felt it needed. The site was reduced to 6 main sub-categories so the main content area is all that needed to be tied into the CMS.
I broke the pages down like this:
I designed the content to adhere to the WP built-in page editor with the addition of the TinyMCE Advanced Editor plugin.
The only other solution I needed to resolve was an easily maintainable photo gallery and video gallery. I came to the conclusion that the best way to showcase photos and photo galleries was a flickr account, and to take it step further I installed the highly customizable flickr RSS plugin to display thumbnails of the most recently added images in the right sidebar of the home page. Since Wrecking Ball already had a YouTube account I simply added a YouTube video feed in the left sidebar. It worked out perfectly.
For the finishing touches I wanted to create a customized log-in area for those maintaining the site. Just a little something to bring it all together. I found a great tutorial at wpengineer.com which uses a php hook and some simple CSS.
Here is how it turned out:
I can safely say that my role in developing the visual identity for Wrecking Ball has been a big learning experience for designing on the web.
Tags: blog, CMS, graphic design, portfolio, redesign, web design, wordpress
