Editorial note: this will be a weekly column by Ben Jenkins
When Kale Steed approached me to help him with his Press Pass Sports website I thought that it‘d be a somewhat easy task to take on, especially with the background of photography and videography that I had.
I never thought that It’d have given me a run for my money like it did. The amount of time it took for us to to strategize, game plan, and find a clear cut vision of what we wanted it to be may have scared some people off.
As I kept working on this page new challenges arose at every turn. Everything new seemed to throw a curveball and brush me off the plate. Yes, I’m a huge baseball fan, I use baseball analogies, bare with me.
A few of the challenges that we saw started with the colors, and the way that the page was going to fit within that spectrum. The white, red and black just seemed to be the perfect fit. It matched the logo perfectly and was easy on the eyes. As you have seen every page has some aspect of all three of those colors on it. The background being white with a football field style grid in the back ground, the red and white lettering, and the red accents to make things pop out a bit.
Page layout was a big deal as well.
We wanted the website to have a simple flow and easy to navigate. Something I personally thought wasn’t going to be all that difficult to figure out. I was dead wrong.
That task ended up being one of the most challenging things to do. Not only did everything have to go together but it still had to look like it belonged, with the home page being the most difficult page to sort out. The home page that you see now wasn’t anything near what it was only a few hours before midnight of launch day.
With everything going on all at once the absolute most difficult thing to figure out was the media that you see on the page. From learning how to input pictures into stories all the way down to making the sponsors pictures linkable to their website. Everything about media have some type of problem.
The videos not wanting to load into the “all videos” channel, pictures going into the wrong files and not to mention most of the media disappearing out of nowhere one day.
All in all, however, this is an experience that I wouldn’t trade for in the world. Having the opportunity to bring something that the Texas Panhandle was missing and needing to fruition has been one of the biggest highlight of my career so far. Being able to give some of the teams a bit of coverage that has been well deserved will always bring a smile to my face.
