Ruggles Creative

Camp Hickory Web Site

admin — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 20:29:44 +0000

Camp Hickory is a residential summer camp and year-round conference and retreat center located north of Chicago. Phil Long recently took over as Camp Manager and immediately contacted us about coming up with a new web site design for Camp Hickory. With a background in marketing and advertising Phil knew exactly what they needed.

The design incorprated a very rustic, woodsy feel in keeping with the natural beauty of Camp Hickory. We built the entire project on a Wordpress platform so that the client could manage any section of the site from within the Wordpress CMS. We also developed several custom elements including a photo gallery and an interactive map of the camp.

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Mirage Web Site

admin — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 19:11:27 +0000

I was recently contracted by Klipsch Audio Technologies to create a web site for Mirage Speakers, one of their subsidiaries. Mirage Speakers were marketed to a more refined market (primarily to women) looking for speakers that fit into a home’s existing decor. The site had to convey the simplicity and refined style of the speakers. Our challenge was creating a site that would target the 30s-50s female demographic but would also still appeal to men. We also needed to create a site where every element (buttons, menu, links, graphics) could be translated into different languages without creating new graphics.

A cool color palate and simple lines were chosen to complement the clean look of the speakers. The large graphic on the home page fit well with the photography that was shot for the speaker line.

The site utilizes an jQuery rotating image ‘carousel’ on the home page with CSS styled text over top of the banner. This allowed the main headlines to be translated into different languages and maintained from within the site’s content management system independ of the graphic.

Personal Blog Design

admin — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 18:23:43 +0000

I began the redesign of my personal blog BradRuggles.com back in the summer of 2008 but, as is usually the case with personal projects, it kept getting stuck on the back burner. I finally launched the new design in November of 2008 and continue tweaking little things here and there.

I chose to work with a combination of two themes from WooThemes in this design. I used a couple of their existing premium themes, not just because of the excellent coding and features, but also to show the options available for customizing an existing Wordpress theme.

The completed design features excellent comment styling, custom graphic ads in the sidebar, and automatic image resizing allowing one image to be used for the main home page header, post graphic and thumbnail.

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Anne Jackson Author Site

admin — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 20:07:17 +0000

Anne Jackson’s blog FlowerDust.net is one of the top ranked blogs Christian blogs. As a first-time author and a woman speaking to a primarily male audience in ministry, Anne needed an author web site that would immediately get people’s attention and affirm her credibility.

When Anne approached me to begin work on the design we decided upon a simple navigation structure that highlighted the 4 main areas that readers and fans could connect with her: Facebook, her live speaking schedule, her popular blog and Twitter. To save time and cost I customized an existing design by WooThemes.

The completed site utilizes Wordpress as a Content Management System (CMS) allowing Anne to edit any of the content she wants from within the easy-to-use WP interface.

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