Vote Mark Wiens (real estate)

This was a rush job with no design mocks, for a voting campaign.

I had nothing but a chunk of content to work with. I helped edit and rewrite, and then rendered it in HTML. I found the “name this version” feature of Google Docs to be very helpful, since the content was still in flux as I built the site. It meant I could name the version when I pulled content, and then look at diffs between the last version I pulled and the current state, so I could easily find what I hadn’t looked over and edited yet, and what needed to be updated in the HTML version.

You only have to look at the very earliest entries in my portfolio to find proof that I’m no designer, so I cheated and used a bunch of full-bleed photos from Unsplash, I pulled some icons from Material, picked some colours, and that was pretty much it. During development at some point when images were somewhat finalized, I decided to pick some colours from the first image instead, in an attempt to give the site a more cohesive look. I liked the look better, but Mark asked me to go back to the brighter colours, arguing that it was more lively.

I don’t love how it ended up looking (that’s not specifically because of the above reversion – just in general), but I don’t think it’s horrible. I wish there’d been time to get a designer on board. I’m happy at least with the clarity, the functionality, and the performance.

The site is hosted on Netlify, and not only does this mean it’s hosted for free, it also takes care of builds automatically for me. It made it super easy to set up previews of the next stages, so I could have a staging link to point him to for feedback, and I could prepare and get feedback on the “voting open” and “voting closed” states ahead of time.

The code repository is public on Github.

Results

Mark won a position on the board. In fact, in number of votes he came second (four available positions), just a tiny fraction behind first place, who unlike Mark had been “recommended” by the board and had already served on the board for some time.

Update, a couple of months later

Mark asked for the site to be taken down, but he said I could still host it at an alternative URL, which is now linked above.

The site was originally at votemarkwiens.ca.