The design of this website is meant to give a professional feel, by being well structured and organized. The telegraph as a communication technology is a simple technology, yet fundamental, and we wanted to reciprocate that in the design of the site. After researching and trying different themes, we decided to choose the Savona theme. It is a multi-purpose WordPress theme. It is fully responsive with a clean and minimal design.
Several changes were made to the original theme, in order to make it personalized for our project.
First we removed the menu bar at the top of the site, and we removed the menu anchor. We wanted all the tabs and pages of the site to be visible and accessible in the header, so the user can easily navigate to different pages.
We decided to choose a four color palette for the website that would match the other components of the project such as the system map, the algorithm and the poster. The free version of this theme did not have the option to pick different color palettes, so instead the changes were made in the “Additional CSS” part, and we added CSS code to change the colors of the original site in order to match to the palette that we chose for our project.
The shades of grey go well with a white background and the shade of yellow gives the website a kick. Yellow is the color of happiness, optimism and it tends to evoke creativity, so we used it as part of the background, only showing at the sides, and we also used it when you hoover over the page titles in the header.
There were two types of fonts that we used: Risque, for the primary headlines and titles, and Roboto Slab for the secondary text.
We also made changes to the Layout of the site. We removed the photo galley at the home page, and the lightboxes that would show up in different parts of the site. Instead each page has a top-to-bottom view followed by a side bar for navigation. We also added a button at the end of each page, to take the user to the top area of the site, where all the pages are accessible.
There are two images that we did not create, that are used with permission in our site:
“Parts of a Key.” KD2UJ, Bob Molloy, http://www.kd2uj.com/telegraphy/my_keys/keyparts.html”
“A telegraph key” The National Museum of American History, Morse-Vail telegraph key collection,
http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1096762
We hope you like our website as much as we do, and that you have found it useful in learning something new about the Telegraph and the Morse Key!
