The starting point for the site was a one day user profiling session with Clear Left lead by Andy Budd. This was one of the best days ever spent, focusing on who would be using LocoMatrix, both from a player point of view, and also the game developers. Shortly after this Denis Radenkovic of 38one was appointed to design the logo. He came up with a great selection of ideas and it was hard to choose which to go with. We felt supremely confident that we had made the right choice when we saw the logo in action. The header to this blog was one of ideas sent.
Clear Left then worked on the design and layout of the website – starting with wire-frames and ending up with templates that I have been adapting for Joomla as and when I get the time. I am using the release candidate of v1.5 and am hoping that it the final version won’t be too long. Not so much of a problem as I am nurturing it by hand.
Creating the main template was not a huge problem – but there is quite a steep learning curve when moving over from Mambo (well not so steep and trying to do things the Mambo way and then realising that there is something much better in Joomla. One of the great things is the ability to style any module or component by adapting the original template for that part – and not by adapting it itself, but by creating an override which Joomla will look at when creating a page.
The second thing that I have only just found out about is a neat trick for creating new modules. One of the things that Clear Left had created was some very funky boxes for everything from “about us” to “press pack” to “latest news” (well you will see if you go to the website). I have been creating these as modules by using the “paste in html code” function – and then inserting and positioning these modules as and when required on the various pages (shame I didn’t discover this sooner as I had already done the same thing by hand over the last few weeks).