For over two decades, travel writer Adele Grunberg has been taking several trips a year to various remote destinations around the world, including Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Moved by these experiences, she started her digital “postcards” project in 2005. Originally inspired by the function and form of traditional postcards, these consist of brief but evocative messages meant to convey the experience of a particular locale. In 2015, I began working with Adele to create a new blog and online home for the project that would help her reach an even wider audience.
Postcards from Adele had a great reception upon launch and continues to grow its audience.
I really appreciate your attention to detail. It is great working with you. … Thanks for making my aspiration a reality. I’m so pleased with the result. Adele Grunberg
Design
Before beginning, I performed an analysis of the requirements as well as audience and market research. This was written into a design brief that established the guiding principles for the site’s design and branding. We chose the Explorable theme by Elegant Themes (affiliate link) as a base, from which I created a modernized custom design, layout, and color scheme for the homepage. I also created a custom logo for the site.
Development
I built a custom child theme for the site, taking care to write clean, modular code and extend the base theme’s functionality using current best practices for WordPress and PHP development. Notable customizations include an automatic link to MailChimp, allowing Adele’s mailing list subscribers to be instantly notified when a new postcard is published. Many usability improvements were also added on top of the base theme, particularly for compatibility with mobile devices and touch screens.