I recently completed this site for AAME, the Centre for Politics in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, which is part of Royal Holloway, University of London.
I was approached by the centre's director, Dr Julia Gallagher, who provided me with an overview document about the centre and from that, I was able to put together a suggested structure.
I was keen to test out the new Wix ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence) tool. It worked brilliantly for this project. The end design is very close to what the ADI initially produced for us, which shaved off several hours of design work for me and thereby brought about savings for the client.
Once I got the ADI version to where I wanted it, I switched to 'manual' and had full control of the design again, which was great in terms of tweaking the header, footer and blog.
A key part of the site is the News Hub: www.aame.london/news-hub
I suggested to Julia that all newsworthy content should be uploaded to the News Hub, which is essentially the site's blog. News content might include publications, ongoing projects, seminars, conferences, recently completed PhDs, etc.
By uploading these pieces of news to the blog, they receive an individual URL, which makes it easy to post the content to the centre's social media channels.
As well as appearing in the News Hub, the posts are also filtered into key sections around the website, which makes the content work twice as hard.
We also decided to use Wix's Calendar App: www.aame.london/events
I had tried Google Calendar, as it is free, but aesthetically it didn't work very well. The Wix Calendar App looks great and also allows links to both internal and external pages.
We felt that photos were an important part of the site, and in fact when we first uploaded the photos, it was amazing how the whole site immediately sprang to life. We wanted to avoid costly stock photography but it was difficult using the staff's own photos, as they often weren't high res enough. We found a good solution in www.freeimages.com.
Patrick Hawkins designed the logo, and worked on some posters for a seminar series. For the posters I suggested creating a template, which could be saved as a layered file and then re-purposed for each future seminar. This will save the centre money on design costs going forward.
I set up Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools and Google+/Google My Business, as well as Facebook and Twitter accounts. I also provided instructions so that the faculty team are able to update their own website, but I am available should any structural changes be required in the future.
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