The Creative Circus
Client: The Creative Circus, duh.
Design & Wordpress Development
The Creative Circus has been Chris’s professional home since 2013. It’s a “portfolio school” where Chris directed the Creative Technology and Graphic Design programs.
Being such a strange and creative place, it needs a website that’s a little weird too. So every page was uniquely designed and built with playful animations and interactivity, while still maintaining full ADA accessibility standards.
Tech
- WordPress theme (from scratch)
- SCSS
- Javascript
- GSAP (animation)
- Advanced Custom Fields (WP plugin)
- Gravity Forms (WP plugin)
Summary
Custom WordPress theme with blog, woocommerce shop, mega menu, lots of forms (for admissions and marketing), and special templates for programs, graduates, alumni, faculty.
Branding and Tone
The big difficulty on this site was creating pages that were fun enough to represent the school and its brand while still being structured enough to be editable by a non-technical employee, and readable by search engine robots and screen readers.
Bespoke Design → Custom Code
Almost no plugins needed, just lots of custom SCSS, javascript, and GSAP for all the slideshows, video, scroll effects, a very custom “mega menu” navigation.
And of course, being on staff, I maintained the site for years.
Lots of Fun
My favorite page might be the Faculty and Staff page, where teachers are the stars of the show (get it?), and react to your mouse.
This site can be viewed publicly, but for security reasons, I can’t share code or provide a log in for the back end.
Note: The live site is no longer available, so this is a clone of the site on my server.
