Our family joined the CSOF for the 2002 season, and we were very pleased with the variety and quality of the produce we received. When I found out that they had a under-utilized website, I volunteered to redesign it. The first version of the website can be seen at the bottom of this page.
I gave it more of a "farmstand feel" by broadening the palette of colors, adding the picture of vegetables in the header and using garden stakes for the newly streamlined list of links on the left. The front page features a boxed list of each week's harvest (with a background of carrots).
In 2009 I brought the website into compliance with Rutgers University web standards – they
require each page to have the Rutgers logotype banner, search link, and a copyright notice. Most of the
University webpages use the red Rutgers logotype, but I found that they also offered a
version in black, which worked much better in this design.
I also changed the main color on the page to green. Previously the "Cook Student Farm"
banner background had been orange; but I thought green looked better with the black banner and
avoided a "Halloween" color scheme.
One of the pages under "About Our Farm" is a CSS-based photo gallery, allowing
the user to mouseover a set of thumbnails and view each photo.
In this initial design, I reorganized the contents and placed the navigation links on the left, and added new sections for vegetable recipes and information about the current growing season.
I chose this background texture because of its resemblance to a plowed field, and set up a "logo" with the farm's name and a picture of the crops.