The Spring 2013 redevelopment of ClarkAndCathy.net wasn’t supposed to happen.
The site was a placeholder. We didn’t use it for anything except for a couple tools that were built into a password-protected administration system. We had a WordPress blog that was shared only to family members (security through obscurity, true, but really we were just going for privacy anyway).
What I really wanted to do was redesign my personal site, ClarkRasmussen.com. When I started looking into that, though, I realized that most of the admin tools on ClarkRasmussen.com were also on ClarkAndCathy.net, with each version just pointing to a different (but structurally identical) set of database tables. On top of that, my wife’s site had the same setup.
I decided to redevelop ClarkAndCathy.net as a massive code cleanup, which would make my redesign of ClarkRasmussen.com easier.
I created a new design for ClarkAndCathy.net, featuring a large photo as the banner with a text header over the top of it. The banner was built in such a way that the photo could be automatically swapped out but it launched with only one photo available.
Because the public site is just a placeholder, it contains only links to other sites, so if anyone ever actually went there they might be able to find something useful.
The same design was applied to the blog.
Needing a good favicon for the newly-redesigned site, I put together a quick logo consisting of a pair of different-colored interlocking Cs.
On the back-end, I replaced the custom user-management system for our admin tools with the WordPress one. This meant that rather than having a blog login, a shared site login, and logins to each of our individual sites, we were down to one login for everything.
Tools that related to ClarkRasmussen.com specifically were ported over to the ClarkAndCathy.net admin system and ClarkRasmussen.com was updated to read from that database, which consolidated three databases down to one.
In the end, what resulted was a new ClarkAndCathy.net that had a single login to manage the blog and a set of admin tools that controlled content on multiple sites.
The above text and images were copied directly from my original portfolio as I imported it over to the blog. It was not updated for re-publishing.