Midnight Sun Website

In first year of Univeristy, a team of 3 of us took on the cahllenge of redesigning a new business website for the UW Midnight Sun Solar Car Team, uwmidsun.com



Team
3 first year engineering students - we were the designers of the website.


Contributions
We worked together to create the interface of the main pages of the website. I am currently responsible for creating and updating content and reworking the design where necessary.


Timeline
September 2018 (2 weeks)


Tools
Squarespace, Figma, Photoshop

CONTEXT

Our Team
Since 1988, the Midnight Sun Solar Car Team has been designing & building solar-powered electric vehicles at the University of Waterloo. We have competed at races around the world including the American Solar Challenge & The World Solar Challenge.

Why Squarespace?
The idea behind using Squarespace was to make sure that the website is easy to maintain and add to in the future. The people who takeover in future years may not know how to code and so Squarespace seemed to be a suitable platform.

BACKGROUND

Problem
Building a solar car is no easy feat for a group of undergraduate students, especially when it comes to funding. The Midnight Sun Solar Car team was looking for digital marketing solutions that would allow us to connect with potential sponsors

Goal
To provide a single source to showcase the teams’ history, activities and achievements.

FIRST ROADBLOCK

Uh oh...
A UW Midsun Alumni was maintaining the website but unfortunately stopped & our website was deactivated! We were now on a time crunch & we needed to get our website up and running as soon as possible! Other UW Midnight Sun Business members have started reaching out to sponsors so we needed to have it up soon!

Quick Thinking!
Our old website was dark, with a mysterious theme & we decided to incorporate that into our 'solution.' We designed & published a temporary landing page under the same domain, noting that a new website would be up and running soon. We had bought ourselves some time, but we were still on a tight schedule! Check out our landing page below:


PLANNING

We worked together with the team's PM, to determine content hierarchy, We planned that we would set up the following before publishing:

  • Home
  • Sponsors
  • About Team
  • Car History

To ensure that multiple people did not take on the same tasks, we set up a Trello board. This also helped us see how our progress was and allowed us to break down our plans for each idea into stories.

After stories were written, it was up to the designers to design a quick mock-up of the idea and then receive feedback from core team members. We would also leave a note on the ticket with design specifications & reasons for certain decisions. See an image of our Trello board below!


STYLE GUIDE

Colours

FINAL PRODUCT

Click the image below to view the live website!


Did something pique your interest?

I'm always happy to chat more! Feel free to reach out to me through LinkedIn or email. I look forward to meeting you!