It is been a long time i haven’t work freelance mostly because of my full time job that take me a lot of time. However, for the last month, i keep browsing the web for new stuff, techniques and i keep my self updated on my new favorite web architecture: WordPress.

I wanted to redesign the website of my football team for a while. I designed and coded the first edition 4 years ago while i was learning to code. This project was a draft that i was glad of and since i got a lot of good feedbacks, i did not touch it that much.

The problem with most projects that i am working on by myself is that i hate its design as soon as i finished it. Basically, i have to leave it as it is and jump to something else as soon as i can to avoid loosing way too much time.

This is what happened with this ‘Gaulois de Saigon” old website. I could simply not stand it anymore. As it was coded without CMS function, i had to get into the code every week for every update. Secondly, besides conservative peoples say that the old one was better, it was for me remains of my immaturity when i start designing.

The new website is done on top of a minimalist and pretty well coded theme called Industry from contempographicdesign

I figured out rapidly that i could adapt my content within this theme easily and rapidly. I actually released the website after around 20hours of works. Feedback that i often got from the previous website was : warm. Personally, i judge it childish with a bad color scheme and bad information design. While visiting the website, i felt like this is an amateur football team and this is not the image i wanted for the Club although it was the idea at the beginning.

This is why the new website looks more professional. A friend of mine, Erwan Gallile, took nice shot of match and i adopt the classical: Menu/Slider/News/Footer. This classical scheme starts to be boring for designer after having been used so much during the last 2 years in the web design industry. However, it has the advantage of a recognizable and organized information design.

As i said before, i love wordpress and i start to manipulate it very well even if i don’t have time to design my own theme, which i’d love. Using wordpress as a CMS is a huge advantage comparing to the old website. I created a few accounts for my team mate to write some posts and match reports. Secondly,  comments feature will make the site more lively.

I got a few negative feedback about not enough visual and i will work toward a more attractive home page. However, i already got 2 mails from people is HCMC that visited the website and want to play football. I don’t know whether this is thanks to the new design but this is encouraging…