K2BSA Website

I recently developed an itch to update the K2BSA Amateur Radio Association’s website. It had been about one year since the last update of the site. The driver this time had been to adopt a cleaner look as well as to implement a responsive WordPress theme. A responsive theme allows the website to change its dimensions to meet the size of the browser’s window. This allows it to play well with tablets, etc.

One year ago, I had updated the theme to Builder, an extraordinarily versatile theme from my favorite WordPress vendor, iThemes. The child theme at that time was Foundation with the Glacier color scheme. This time I upgraded to the latest version of Builder, that brings in the responsive aspects, and used a recently introduced child theme called Icebox. What I like about this theme is that it has a very clean look, but more importantly that look lends itself extremely well to the responsive environment. With earlier static themes, with all the color schemes at play, I spent lots of time getting word counts and images correctly sized so that all the various widgets on the page would match correctly from column to column. With this theme, it really doesn’t matter that much because the match is just not visible. Wonderful!

I also spent some time with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator taking some stock vector graphics, tweaking them, and then blending them into the new website header. I also spent a great deal of time looking at fonts that matched the letters/numbers of K-2-B-S-A and also matched the look/feel of the new website theme. I also replaced the home page video with a slide show of some of the great photos that I collected from the 2012 Jamboree on the Air.

Overall, I like how it turned out. Plus, it provides a very fresh image for the website. This will stay in place at least through 2013 — until such time as a new approach catches my eye!