This project started as an urgent time crunch in need of a quick solution. Every year an awards ceremony would be held for high school athletes in various categories and would feature a guest speaker, usually a fellow athlete of some renown. For 2019 they wanted the guest speaker to be Oklahoma native and six-time NBA All-Star Blake Griffin. At first he wasn’t available, but then had an opening but that would mean rescheduling the ceremony and therefore all involved vendors would have to move quickly to setup the event.
Unfortunately, the organizers’ usual web developers were not going to be able to make the crunch which involved a two week turnaround. Our team was asked if we could do it with such short notice, and so our lead developer quickly setup a hosting account and our content team began writing copy. I worked with a local photographer to put together a bundle of photos both of Blake’s career highlights and of past award ceremonies, then got started on the design.
The deadline for this job was not going to be flexible. In order to give the families of the nominees time to attend the event they needed to send an email out with a link to a registration page, and it couldn’t happen any later than the two weeks we were given. So, a decision was made to build the entire thing using Gutenberg blocks which would provide the quickest flexibility and the largest set of tools from which we could draw when it came to doing things on the page.
Thankfully, the use of blocks and well-coordinated teamwork on content creation meant we had a public-ready website in a week with plenty of time left over for feedback and internal QA and traffic stress-tests before the email campaign went out. The coordinators were blown away at the speed we were able to move, and it allowed them to focus on other urgent event matters rather than stressing over their website. One of the event coordinators had been so pessimistic going into it that she’d been toying with setting up a Wix or Squarespace website on her own (I forget which one) and was discouraged by how ugly those projects had turned out, then delighted when by the end of the first week we were showing a sharp and complete site with well-written pages and rich photo galleries all ready to go.
We added an “RSVP Here” banner in the header for a few weeks, and a “Confirm Registration” process, but then took that down as a small update just before the event occurred. Though this project was simply meant to be a band-aid until they could get across the finish line it wasn’t treated as such by our team. We took it seriously and rose to the challenge.
