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AFH-St. Louis Original Website circa 2008

R.I.P. Old Website

by Bredon on July 3, 2011

I received some sad news recently. One of my earliest websites would need to be taken down and the URL forwarded to another site.

Back when I was just getting started in web design, several of my friends were involved with the St. Louis chapter of Architecture for Humanity. They wanted to have a website setup much like some of the other city chapters had at the time. I knew just enough about putting together websites to be dangerous, so I humbly offered my low-cost services (read: free) and they accepted. With much fanfare, rejoicing and ignorance I began developing what would soon become one of the most mediocre, unused and underutilized websites in the history of the web (although, not necessarily mediocre by the standards of architecture non-profit websites).

Fast-forward a few years, and due to some changes at the international organization, the St. Louis AFH needed to make some changes to the site. Basically, we needed to turn the web page into a static landing page that would link out to AFH’s websites where they had setup subdomains for each chapter. So I began the design process with the idea of using a architectural floor plan to divide up the various links. I was pretty excited about this concept, because it would be fun to play with fonts and colors to add spice to the dry black and white layout.

Landing Page Proposal

Unfortunately, this was about as far as I got. It turned out that we actually were no longer allowed to have a website outside of the subdomain offered by AFH on their webspace. It makes a lot of sense for them to be able to control branding, and to capture content from random people who are running around saying they are with Architecture for Humanity. So I was disappointed but I definitely understood where they were coming from.

Anyway, at least I can add it as a design concept in my portfolio.

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