A CIC website built to the founders' own designs

What the site is

A community interest company website, built to the founders’ own designs. The build included custom PHP for dynamic multicoloured headings and redirect behaviour, responsive design with particular attention to mobile font sizing and menus, and custom cookie and privacy policies.

Every heading on the site runs the festival palette letter by letter, and no one has to pick the colours by hand.

How it came together

Queer Minds started out on wordpress.com hosting, at around £20 a month, and it charges extra to install plugins that are free on a normal WordPress install. So the first job was a proper WordPress install on SiteGround: less money, none of the restrictions.

The plan from there was that the founders would build the site themselves. I set up the tooling, the plugins and the base WordPress so they had everything they needed, and they had a good go at it, but building a website has a way of producing roadblocks, and in the end they came back to me to implement their designs. At that point the cleanest path was to reset WordPress and build fresh, so their vision went in on a clean foundation rather than on top of the experiments.

Why it worked

The founders did all the designs themselves and knew exactly what they wanted, which is what kept the project reasonably priced. My job was implementation, not invention. The site on screen is the site they drew, and that’s a neat demonstration of what a web developer is actually for: not to replace a client’s ideas, but to get them onto the screen intact.

The same heading treatment carries the archive.

The festival, in person

George and Nick, Queer Minds’ founders, at the 2024 festival. The website’s job is to keep this audience together between festivals.