Back in July, the WRAL team approached us about pulling together a quick pop-up website for their Nights of Lights event.
Started during the COVID pandemic, Nights of Lights began simply as a way to let the community come together to celebrate the holidays while raising funds for non-profit organizations in the area. Nights of Lights has become a key initiative for WRAL—and a regional holiday tradition—in just a couple of years.
Proceeds from NIghts of Lights benefit the Dix Park Conservancy, Inter-faith Food Shuttle, Healing Transitions, and WRAL’s Coats for the Children.
Getting Started
The WRAL Nights of Lights team reached out to us in late summer of this year. Given the event’s growth, they decided it was time to let it have a website of its own.
We knew we’d need to move quickly, and with the ticketing element offloaded to a third party, we knew that Squarespace was an option that was more than capable for the project’s needs.
Working on the Edge
While the WRAL team was finalizing content and assets, Squarespace announced their new website-building platform: Fluid Engine. As a Circle member, the HALO 22 team had early access to this, and we spent some time kicking the tires to see what we were getting into.
In beta, the platform showed great promise over the prior engine—notably, the finer control over mobile presentation.
Building the Website
Once we had content and assets from the WRAL team, we set to work.
It was great working with a media company like WRAL. Diving right in with live content, a wealth of visual assets, and a complete set of brand assets allowed us to quickly flow from layout to branding for our first review with WRAL.
Between the content and brand assets and our depth of experience building online experiences, we could quickly refine from that first round and were nearly launch-ready.
Constraints Bring Pros and Cons
Constraints should be a factor in any design project. This project had to be completed on a tight timeframe, which partly led to the decision to use Squarespace.
Squarespace was the right call for this site. We did push up against some bugs in the new Fluid Engine.
Look, we’re picky—it’s our job to be particular about how things work. We ran into inconsistent behavior in how elements were handled in the mobile editor.
Furthermore, Squarespace still doesn’t offer an in-depth responsive edit suite, and some odd default settings at tablet and small laptop viewports weren’t what we wanted.
Not a big deal for the HALO 22 team. We simply built a bit of custom CSS to improve the user experience for mobile and those between sizes.
We can’t wait to see where Nights of Lights goes in the coming years.
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If you’re around the Triangle this holiday season, consider spending an evening at WRAL Nights of Lights. It’s an excellent time for some great causes.
This project was produced at HALO 22. See the original post.
Art Direction: David Spratte, HALO 22
Design: Emily Combs, HALO 22