Created for the Wild Prairie Chapter of the Harley-Davidson Owners Group®; sponsored by Wild Prairie Harley-Davidson® of Eden Prairie MN.

The goal were to create a website that

1. Promotes the fun and family oriented image of the club.
2. Provides information to club members. Especially for photos and event dates and details

The design criteria was rather broad:

Please use tan and make the site interesting but not too busy

While interviewing the club officers and some of the members they expressed frustration because the current site was:

1. Hard to update
2. Really didn't allow photos to be added easily

This is the finished website you can see it at WildPrairieHOG.com

I chose Joomla 1.6 for this project. It has the plug-in for galleries and slideshows that the members were interested in. It also enabled me to get a functioning website ready to launch in just a few weeks. Yes, that's right, I was on a strict deadline.

I started by sampling the color tan from the existing website. With that I had to choose whether the second color would be black or orange. For those unfamiliar with Harley-Davidson their colors are Black and Orange. I opted for an orange with tan undertones so that it would blend well with the overall look and feel of the site.

I used GCalendar from Laoneo to include Google Calendar into the website. GCalendar also has a module that displays the upcoming events. I like using Google Calendar on websites because it allows members to include the club calendar in their own calendars.

I am discovering more and more users know how to use GCalendar, plus it helps improve SERP.

The photo gallery is powered by PhocaGallery. I like this gallery because it navigates well and I thought it was easy to organize photos. It also has a module for a slideshow. This is what appears on the home page. I have received some criticism from the club photographer. He would prefer a gallery that allows for drag-n-drop to arrange the photos. While I agree that this would make the gallery easier to use, I don't believe that is a short coming of Phoca Gallery--I believe that is a limitation of Joomla.

Tools used

I use Adobe Photoshop CS4 for the graphics, Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 for any code hacks or enhancements, Artisteer 3 to create the template.