English and French websites recently were redesigned from top to bottom and after many months of work have been launched.

Perhaps some history on the website would be helpful. The site was previously all hand coded in HTML and roughly three years ago under went a slight upgrade to remove the table based design. Over the years the site had grown to the point that the current design and overall structure needed to be looked at. After a meeting and several phone calls a new site structure was ironed out and a design slowly came into existence. The original website was an orange colour so the move to a new purple color was a dramatic shift in look for the website.

Since the website was being redone it was decided it would be a good idea to move the site into WordPress to allow them to be able to edit and create their own pages on the website. Previously if there were any changes to the site they needed to call me to fix even the smallest typos. Now with the site being in WordPress they can simply login and edit the content as they need. This is true of both the English and the French versions of the website.

Aside from the website now being powered by WordPress the design was created using the Headway Theme framework. This made it easy to create the custom look for each individual section as well as add in our own custom CSS. The French version of the website actually pulls in the CSS from the English site and then with only minor CSS edits to accommodate some longer French phrases was created fairly quickly. This helps to maintain a consistent look and feel between the English and French websites while making it easy to adjust the design and layout.

Along with WordPress the websites also take advantage of a content delivery network from MaxCDN to help improve the load time. Javascript, CSS, images and most importantly the videos are distributed using the CDN. This has made a dramatic decrease in the load time of the website.

I have had the pleasure of working with Do Bugs Need Drugs off and on for close to 10 years and was pleased to help them with this current version of their website. I hope you will find it useful and the information is very informative. Many thanks to the team at Do Bugs Need Drugs and I look forward to working with you all in the future.