Courtney Summers Project Overview

Courtney Summers is a burgeoning young writer with an groundswell of attention regarding her first book, Cracked Up To Be, and her latest book, Some Girls Are. She wanted a new website that reflects her tastes and style, while also keeping true to the blog she had. We built a smart, simple website on WordPress with some unique use of jQuery javascript & AJAX.

One-Of-A-Kind

In order to deliver something different, we thought about Courtney’s unique and interesting writing style, and wanted to come up with a way to showcase it. As a result, we developed a single-column website which showcases content and the arrangement of navigation & WordPress elements do not distract a visitor.

Demo Environment

We setup a demo environment for Courtney as soon as we had a good chunk of coding in place so she could modify, add or remove existing content we had migrated from her previous website.

The end result was a development website that was super simple for Courtney to get things the way she wanted before launch time. We were also able to answer questions she had about publishing content, and provided helpful guidance along the way to make sure she felt comfortable managing the website on her own.

Courtney Summers Gallery

CourtneySummers.ca (2009)

•   Landing Page

  The main page has a minimalist aroma but high impact scent.

•   Landing Page: 3 Blocks

  Three vertical double bars were aimed at achoring expectations for other aspects of the site and providing visual interest.

•   Novels Page

  This area is extensible by Courtney- she can add new novels with the template easily, and manage existing ones just the same.

•   Bio Page

  Simple but to the point, another example of how Courtney's site stands out by not doing anything more than it has to.

•   Post / Comment Area

  A lot of functionality was delivered in an effectively unique use of space on the blog post page, from PDF generation to social networking sharing.

•   Blog Archives

  The blog archives are aimed at piquing interest and serve a purpose: invite those interested to dig a little deeper.

•   jQuery Sprinkles

  We added a dash of jQuery javascript effects to make good use of space and keep things simple for readers.

•   Contact Page

  The contact page leverages a WordPress plugin, customized for her site.

•   Links Page

  Simple but organized place for Courtney to keep her weblinks.

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CourtneySummers.ca (2008)

•   Blog

  The main blog view.

•   Contact Form

  Contact form leveraging CForms plugin.

•   Landing Page

  Unique prev|next nav of post excerpts and a simple large +3 box admin-editable layout grabs attention.

•   About/Bio

  Clear and effective about page.

•   Links Page

  Nice vertical layout of Courtney's links, managed easily in the WordPress admin

•   Novels Page

  The novels page wasn't the best (we did much better in our second pass) but it did showcase Courtney's work.

•   Post Page: Top

  Clear prev/next post nav and metadata on the right get out of the way of the most important thing: content.

•   Post Page: Comments

  Comments were designed to create a sense of identity and community.

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From: Courtney Summers

I’ve been a big fan of BraveNewCode for some time now. They were nothing short of brilliant and a total pleasure to work with and I would highly, highly recommend them to anyone in the market for a (sexy) website. You can’t do better than BNC.

BraveNewCode’s work process sheet speaks for itself. I personally had a great experience working with them for the relaunch of courtneysummers.ca and it’s going to make me feel warm and fuzzy inside to direct people who are looking for great designers their way.

Dale and Duane are very meticulous and every last bit of code that shapes this site was typed by them. They don’t mess around with pre-existing WordPress templates or icky WYSIWYG editors and leave errant bits and invisible code gremlins to clutter up space and steal server resources. The work they do is specified, careful, clean, professional and, well, sexy (bringing the sexy back was very important to me).
~ Courtney Summers
Author