Sponge Project Blog

As a favour to the headmaster at my boy’s primary school, I took on some work to design and build a new website for them. The result is Tirlebrook Primary School:

The key need for them was a simple and easy to use back end, so I chose the ‘ol faithful Wordpress. I heavily customised Chris Peasons’s Cutline theme and modified the admin system to meet their needs. There’s a few plugins installed, namely:

• Quotes Collection - use this for the random “What people say” section in the sidebar
• Wordpress Ready Contact Form - another favourite for the “Contact us” page
• Google Sitemap Generator Plugin - great little plugin to generate search engine friendly sitemaps
• Add Alt - to help keep the code valid
• BackUpWordpress - does what it says on the tin and very well I might add

If you want me to build you a website, just drop me a line and we can discuss.

So I’ve had enough of the design contests for now and of the 4 contests I entered I averaged 2 stars, which is pants. I think this boils down to the lack of time and not being able to give enough polish and detail to each contest. Anyway, I won’t give up and will keep plugging away.

More information on my “Design contest debate” following on from last week’s post. So here goes:

• Entered one extra contest above and beyond the ones already entered into. Lesson learnt - too many contests = bad! Essentially I took too much on and ran out of time and focus which affected all of my entries (of which none won!).
• Content holders and/or clients seems to like lots of generic and cheesy stock imagery. Lesson learnt - use more images in my designs.
• Logical structure and layout don’t seem to play a part in winning designs. In fact the more you cram onto the page navigation and content-wise the better your chances of winning! Also contest holders are not always the end client, in many cases they are another design agency. No lessons learnt, just observations.

So carrying on regardless with a few more entries, but the main thing against me at the moment is time. Balancing a full-time job and family life against contest entries is affecting the quality of my work and the amount of polish I’m able to give it. So less is more when taking on new contests. I’ll be focussing on one per week I think and see how that goes.

In the ongoing “Design contest debate” as I’m calling it, here’s a quick update on the contests entered so far (all via 99 designs):

1. Entered one that got withdrawn 4 days before it was due to finish! Was hours away from uploading my entry. Lesson learnt: tell them in the comments that you’re going to enter.
2. Entered another one and have got 3 stars (not good) but no feedback. Lesson learnt: ask for feedback.
3. Keep an eye on the contest’s status (healthy, caution or unhealthy) to see if the contest holder is really keeping an eye on things and providing the feedback needed.

I have a long watchlist of cool sounding contents that I intend to enter soon, so will keep you posted.

I’ve posted on the subject of design competitions before, which failed to reach a suitable conclusion for me, however I did stop entering them shortly afterwards.

But a recent article over at Sitepoint titled Design Contests Made Me A Better Designer has rekindled my interest somewhat. Basically the article is with Richard Scott, a designer who has been very successful with using design contests as his main income so understandably argues for them. The crux of the article is that the debate exists and will always exist because that’s life, but he sees it as a viable, if not slightly addictive, method of generating design work. If everyone agreed on everything all of the time life would be dull and grey.

So with that in mind I’m going to start a small experiment in my spare time and focus on one or two competitions to see what results I get. It’s not going to be overly scientific, but will give me a good indication of whether I think Richard’s success can be repeated (not suggesting I’m as good a designer as he is by the way).