Creators Special Sections

Creators Special Sections

Special sections are bundles of related content newspapers run, generally in Sunday editions. Special sections are an important part of Creators' sales line-up. This site was built to properly display section content, and to replace an extremely outdated product page.

The special section site can be seen at specialsections.creators.com.

The Client

The client for this site is Creators' special sections sales person, Gunner Coil. He provided design input and defined the feature set for the site.

My Role

I designed and developed the site.

Technology Used

The site runs on the PHP framework CodeIgniter with a MySQL back-end.

The front-end uses Flatstrap, a Bootstrap fork, to implement flat-style UI elements.

About the Code

This site contains all of the functionality from the old special section display site, including basic listing of recent sections, listing stories included in sections, and a form to contact the sales rep.

The new site also includes a lot of new features to make the management of special sections easier. These include an automatically updating release calendar, automatically updating site content (the old site was 100% manual) and a dynamically generated "newspaper layout" — the old site offered paginated previews in PDF format that had to be painstakingly made manually.

The site focuses on graphical elements quite a bit since the high quality photos included in special sections are a main selling point for papers and advertisers. The header uses parallax scrolling to scroll against page scroll, revealing more of the image as the user scrolls down. The sections are represented by large 940px wide header images that are chosen to be visually appealing.

Images