Dirt du Jour

www.dirtdujour.com
Launched on February 18, 2009
Blogs, Bloggers, Blogging, Environmental, Good Design, We Blog

Read about this project on the blog

Cindy McNatt is a staff writer with the Orange County Register who came to Hop Studios with an interest in breaking away from her day job with her own web project. She had very clear ideas on what she was looking for. She wanted to launch a new blog under the name Dirt du Jour and focus on providing gardening tips, techniques and advice. Cindy also wanted to turn her blog content into a daily electronic newsletter available to subscribers and readers.

The site is built in ExpressionEngine. The publication of the newsletter is fully integrated into the blogging workflow and makes use of the communicate tool built into ExpressionEngine to send it out to Cindy’s mailing list.

Cindy wanted the design to be clean and simple with elegant little touches to highlight a love of gardening. Matt created lovely hand-drawn titles for the blog header and newsletter, as well as information boxes that resemble pinned up notes to highlight ads and the newsletter sign up in the sidebar. The whimsical illustrations used throughout the site of birds, leaves, and the tea cup in the header were created by Cindy herself. A fun detail of the site is that the footer at the bottom of the page, called the “Compost Pile”, resembles a stretch of brown dirt ready for gardening.

National Park Central Reservations
Live on January 13, 2012

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