Running on Empty

Perhaps empty isn’t quite the correct term; certainly we’ve been preoccupied, as the minimal posting here shows. It’s primarily my fault – I’m running the Boston Marathon for charity in April, and over the past few months training, fundraising and eating have become my primary concerns; Jack is a bit shy about blogging, so things have laid fallow here.

That doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy! We have several projects underway in the new year, and plenty going on. Coinciding with my marathon training, though, we’ve also received a handful of inquiries as to whether or not we design websites. (This has made us realize that perhaps we need to make our offerings more apparent.)

The answer is yes, very yes! Our most recent web project was my marathon fundraising page and blog.

Jack was inspired by the colors of each of the organizations involved in my run, and created a vibrant, punchy palette for this custom WordPress theme. Listening to James Brown while designing prompted the Get Up/Get Down navigation.

To track donations, Jack created a custom field that would allow us to update a progress bar; this allows me to include donations received by cash or check, which the Razoo widget does not include in its totals.

Kate Runs consists of two pages – a primarily static About page, and the blog. The blog is themed to pull in the same palette as the About page; links are green to ensure visibility, and the title, comment and category headings each feature a different color from the theme. Text is still large and simple, and social media sharing features are included at the end of each post. Get Up/Get Down navigations follows through here as well.

I’ve been thrilled with the end result, and donors have been enjoying the site as well. The project was a fairly simple one, but having a personalized site for my fundraising has been a helpful and lends some credibility to my campaign, and having friends, family and colleagues able to follow along with my training has been very rewarding.

What do you think?