STA Blog

Woolley Labs Site Redesign

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Woolley Labs Site Redesign

Project: UT Psychology Labs: Imagination and Cognitio Lab

Client: Woolley Labs

Staff Guidance: Stacy Vlasits

Tools Used: WordPress

Started: Jan 14, 2024

Completed: Jan 16, 2024

The Task

This week I was asked to redesign Dr. Jacqueline D. Woolley’s Lab Website. The outdated structure of it was not built on WordPress and was very hard to navigate and old. With many of the links broken and interested student/participants not able to find what they need this site was definitely due for a redesign.

Old Website:

Starting Out

The ask was pretty simple with some small requirements that did increase the difficulty.

  • Finish the redesign in the span of 2 shifts (6 hours)
  • Incorporate the current header image

The lack of direction and the short amount of time definitely gave me a interesting type of challemge which required me to think in a quick efficient way creatively.

To start this process I very quickly, setting a timer for 10 minutes, reimagined how the key pages could look experimenting with different layouts of the nav and how the content was organized.

Moving to WordPress

After having this rough idea, I went to WordPress to bring my idea to life. This run of using WordPress was very interesting because they actually updated their editor interface. Luckily after a quick tutorial from Stacy I was able to learn the Template to Page structure

Using my own “Imagination & Cognition”

One of the key parts of this site I wanted to come through is taking the colors and themes from the header into the rest of the design. By sampling these colors as my pallete and using rounded croners on most things I was able to keep a clean theme throughout the site

The Final Design + Reflection

View the final site here: https://labs.la.utexas.edu/woolleylab/

Overall this quick sprint of a redesign taught me a lot. In this project I learned:

  1. How to utilize WordPress’s new Editor interface effectively
  2. Designing in a quick timeframe
  3. Learning how think creatively efficiently without much guidance or restriction