The Nitefive Redesign (Part II: Planning)

Going a little further in the conceptualization of the nitefive redesign process, I’m going to share a few design & development considerations that are going in place ahead of time. The first step is to figure out what platform it’ll be developed on. For me, the decision is pretty straightforward - Wordpress. Wordpress already provides the basic CMS features that I’m looking for, and I’m familiar with the code base so modifying the theme and the base code of the site should hopefully be pretty straightforward.

The next real decision is determining navigation and usability. I’m going to try to keep up the original nitefive.com simplicity, but streamline it so that interesting sections are highlighted appropriately. I’ve narrowed down the navigation to:

• Wear: This will cover eco-conscious club and night time attire - basically broken out in to two sub-sections: men’s wear and ladies wear. This way each gender will have their own specific bucket of information to pull from. Again, since it’s such a niche topic (eco-conscious party people) I’m thinking the process for finding relevant articles will be pretty straightforward.
• Eat: This is all about finding restaurants and recipes for evenings out and upscale dinner parties that have an organic and earth-friendly flare to them.
• Drink: This topic is probably one of the harder ones to dial in - but basically I want to develop profiles of companies and drinks that are eco-friendlier than the rest. This has a lot more to do with the individual product supply chain sustainability than it does with whether or not rum is more eco-friendly than vodka. I’m curious to see if I can even make this category fly…
• Go: This is probably the hub of the site. This is all about finding clubs, bars, restaurants, and events with an eco-conscious theme. This will include clubs that actively recycle or bars that have proactively sought green building materials.
• Listen: Again, a tough topic section to pull off - this will be dedicated to musicians and record labels that have made strides to become ecologically balanced. I’m thinking things like bands that tour on ethanol-powered buses, or labels that give back a certain % of their earnings towards green initiatives.
• Watch: Movies, theaters, and performance exhibits with green in mind. Similar to the “Go” section, but with a greater emphasis on spectator events than on interactive / participatory events (like clubs & bars, etc).
• The catch-all: Of course, there will always be topics that don’t quite fit in these standards. I’m thinking things like green personal care products, eco-friendly home products, etc. Things that sort-of relate to eco-conscious partygoing without necessarily fitting in the previously outlined topics.

So, those are the main navigation categories of the site. Fortunately, in Wordpress this native relationship with categorization is built-in to their category process. I’m going to definitely plan on using tags and tag clouds extremely heavily to ensure that navigation can be both rigid and free-flowing, and search functionality is handled by Wordpress natively. That’s a big consideration when trying to plot a redevelopment out.

In the next redesign article, I’ll talk a lot more about cracking open the Wordpress theme engine, manipulating the loop, and building a customized website that will (hopefully) be forward compatible with future WP releases. The main challenges will be to feature a multi-topic homepage that will intuitively promote the latest content, as well as tiering-down older information. Also, each category will need its own unique look and feel, yet stay within the parameters of the site as a whole. And of course, it needs to integrate a strong advertising platform from the onset.

Stay tuned!