After conducting some simple research into freebie websites of the era, there was a clear trend toward bright, cute-character led web platforms to take the edge of an otherwise very busy web page.
This allowed me to have a lot of fun and freedom in creating a brand not only with a distinct colour scheme and friendly leading font, but also a bunch of fun personified creatures to give our affiliates something to be creative themselves within their own satellite campaigns – which I managed to make sure they stuck to our usage guidelines.
Complete with customisations to the WordPress admin dashboard and content editor customisation, it was, at the time in my early career (2012), my the most ambitious responsive web design I had undertaken.
In addition to the site, I designed and coded using Facebook’s overly ambitious FMTL, to create a counterpart iframe ‘app’ and email campaign landing pages to work alongside a MailChimp driven email campaign to encourage users to like the site. This proved to be highly successful, and in just over a year, the site had gained a very strong following across Facebook and Twitter and employed several staff to manage several daily tasks tied directly to my WordPress build.
There was a bit of fun had with the back-end code too. To keep returning users engaged, I added some simple PHP scripts to alternate various graphics to coincide with national holidays (Christmas, Easter etc.) to keep things fresh. This seasonal ‘refresh’ was again continued throughout social media outlets for the site.
This lead generation site is also possibly the first UK freebie or deal site to be 100% responsive.
