Website: KDP.org
Client: Kappa Delta Pi
Technologies used: HTML, CSS, JavaScript
Contributions: Applied a new visual coat of point (and a few functional additions) for the desktop version of the website, created a mobile/tablet-friendly version.
Demo: KDP.org

Some websites have more baggage and history than others by the time I have a chance to work on them. Kappa Delta Pi’s was considerably baggy — several hundred pages, loosely connected by a design ethos and a stylesheet but not necessarily a template that made it easy to alter every page by editing one. Short of blowing it up and starting over — which was off the table here, because of budget and also because the content or even its arrangement wasn’t as ailed as the presentation of it — to meaningfully and properly update KDP.org in 2014 entailed updating it one page at a time.

So that’s what I did. Honestly, the work here doesn’t make for a great story, but more a testament to my “no page left behind” ethos that compelled me to treat each page, no matter how old and unlikely to be needed again, as part of the rebuild. In the process, of course, I added measures that tied the design to an anchor and made it easy in the future to redesign the entire site by editing only a handful of files. I also deleted a lot of the cruft (Dreamweaver code, mostly, if I’m being honest) that had accumulated and undermined previous attempts to unify the site.

Turns out, past me did future me (now also past me; time is confusing) a favor. When KDP gave me clearance in 2016 to make their site mobile- and tablet-friendly (I can’t recall why this didn’t happen as well in 2014, but it just didn’t, all right?), I was able to add that implementation across the entire site by editing only a handful of pages after I created a stylesheet for those smaller screens. Some of those pages may not have received much traffic since before the smartphone’s invention, but they still look good on one if their name gets called again someday.