As we were putting the finishing touches on the new website redesign for airdrielife magazine’s website, we can’t help but feel a bit giddy about the release and launch of this new site. Sherry Shaw-Froggatt of Frog Media for airdrielife has long since made it a remarkable magazine about the Good Life in Airdrie. It already had an established following and audience that had a certain expectation of quality and finesse. Having the opportunity to create a website that reflects the same diversity, curiosity and casual browsing was a delight for us to be involved with.

The objective of the site was to have something completely responsive and functional to whatever device you happen to be browsing on. It should look beautiful, be easy to read and navigate in all instances. We want you to feel like you are seeing at a glance the vitality and talent of the city and people in Airdrie. Functionality of the airdrielife website had to have a way to subdivide and categorize the articles into departments while allowing for diversity and continual updates of the content as you go. The back end development of this huge site has to be a sweet mix of options for the article appearance but simple enough to replicate each issue with different content.

airdrielife was a challenging website to develop based on all of the custom post types, custom categories and sorting options we wanted to include. This was our vision from the start and we didn’t want to compromise on this,” says Trevor Rounce, co-owner/web developer for Switchback. “Our most proud moment was that we never compromised on the vision, regardless of the roadblocks or the tight timeline required to launch in time for the next issue release. We stuck to that and found a way to make it happen. I enjoyed thinking logically through it all finding a way to make it easy to use, and of course nice to look, at in the process.

We love new challenges and this is definitely a unique type of situation for a website. It is ever growing and evolving, but still organized and always showing a curiosity for information and a different way to experience the airdrielife magazine, wherever you are.