- Client: Valley Society, Straw Dog Writers Guild.
- https://valleysociety.org/
- My role: Strategist & Site builder
- Design name: Ebon Hawk
- Launched: 11.January.2022
- Platform: WordPress
- Reporting: Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console, Google Looker Studio.
Originally conceived of as a kind of multi-blog site, Valley Society was designed around an RSS aggregator to repost the content feeds from the members’ sites. When a user clicks on the story, either the title or the “Continue reading” link, they were directed to the source site.
The site was also built to handle basic stuff you might expect from a club:
- Automated event calendar that drew from Google Calendar.
- WooCommerce to purchase workshop tickets and pay dues.
- Automated Newsletter.
- Pages for administrative things like budget, etc.
As you might guess from the design name, this was intended to be a kind of second home for the solitary path of a few writers.
When the mandate, members and funding of the group changed, the site was consolidated into something closer to a traditional blog, where there would be one or two in-depth posts per year and limited calendar functionality, but now the site would also host audio readings of the long form posts.
This is a black writers group, so the header font is Anton, used for Black Lives Matter signage. The template is Typology, which I have used for a few writer projects on account of its clear preference for readability and limited, but functional presentation of featured images.
