A New Website for the Huntington Beach Desalination Project

I’m excited to announce that I've just completed a website redesign for the Huntington Beach Saltwater Desalination Project. This Orange County initiative aims to bring a carbon neutral, drought-proof water supply to the Huntington Beach area of Southern California. As a redesign/upgrade from Wordpress to Weebly, this site represented two tricky technical challenges. Firstly, I needed to recreate - and improve upon - a scrolling RSS news reader feature. Secondly, I needed to recreate a javascript that counted UP (not down) in a unit of gallons (not time). Everything I build is user-editable, so these puzzles came with a big additional requirement ... my non-techy users needed to be able to edit them in the future. Our other goal was to bring the site into line with the company's established branding and associated online assets.

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I decided to tackle the technical challenges head on so I set about finding an online RSS reader that offered the necessary customization to be able to match the website style sheet. I lucked out by finding a nice one and with a bit of CSS ju ju and a chunk of documentation, that was managed.

Next I went in search of javascripts. This one proved much more difficult so I ended up reverse engineering the counter out of the old site files. Customizing a javascript feature into Weebly isn't for the faint of heart but older scripts are often less problematic and again, I got lucky. After some intensive trial and error I was able to replicate it in a way that the client could manage themselves going forward. In terms of usability, I wasn't a fan of having this feature pop up on the home page as it had on the old site but thankfully the client agreed and we moved it to an internal page. 

Altogether it's an engaging image that conveys the fact that every day of inaction means thousands of gallons of fresh water lost. 

Mobile view

After CarlsbadDesal.com and PoseidonWater.com this is my third website project completed in collaboration with the great team at Poseidon. It’s a real honor to work with these professionals and I want to send a special shout out to Tabitha Smith and Jessica Jones (Director of Communication Extraordinaire) for their endless professionalism and good humor. Thank you for trusting me with your website projects.

​To see the new site visit HBFreshWater.com.

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