wuruwuru

Design, Development, Project Management
www.wuruwuru.com
Collaborators:
Nifemi, ope, tomi
wuruwuru (legally known as Helterskelter Publishing House) is a community studio that makes passion projects with independent creators. wuruwuru means "someway, somehow", and It's culled from the Nigerian phrase "wuruwuru to the answer" which describes a problem solved without a clear process.

I worked at the studio as a Production Assistant for over two years, contributing to the creation of a comic, two websites, two animations, a board game and a book.
Project Goal
The studio needed to revamp its website to create a space for a global audience to engage with the artist and director community while documenting ongoing projects. Our primary objectives for the new website were to:
- Provide extensive information about the projects
- Showcase the creators we collaborate with
My Role
I collaborated with Ope, Tomi and Nifemi to develop the studio's brand identity and design, and to build and maintain the website's content. Ope handled the content architecture and web design for the website, while I focused on designing the mobile version.
Approach

Design

The first version of the wuruwuru website was a one-pager with a checkered background. Most of the links opened external sites, and the most exciting thing about it was a moving cursor.
Our first exploration was a highly visual site similar to Instagram stories, displaying images and short intros for all our projects. While this was an interesting approach it hindered our ability to give due credit to contributors and didn't provide a clear browsing experience.
We scrapped the initial design as it didn't align with our objectives, and went with a more conventional and distinctly clear version. The simpler design had three main pages:
- a projects page to showcase all our projects,
- a people page to highlight the creators we collaborate with, and
- an about page to explain what the studio’s mission.
On the "People" page, our aim was to present concise bios of the creatives, outline the projects they were involved in, and provide contact information. To accomplish this, we needed to implement a dynamic Content Management System (CMS), so we brought in Tomi and Nifemi for the website development.

Development

They utilized a framework called Astro to build the website due to its lightning-fast delivery capabilities. Within the Astro setup, dynamic content is delivered through JSON files embedded in the codebase. Additionally, they employed GitHub for version control and used Netlify for hosting services.

Content

As they built the site, Ope and I curated the content. He handled copywriting, while I distributed a form to collaborators to gather information for the 'People' page. Anticipating that not everyone would respond promptly, I looked all over the internet to gather any available information about them so we could keep moving.

After configuring the local development servers, I took over the task of updating the website's information. I individually contacted the creatives to review their profiles, and made necessary corrections. Subsequently, I applied the updates to the live site by initiating pull requests on GitHub.

Analytics

The previous website didn’t have any analytics software installed, so we had no idea how many people visited the site. To address this, we opted for a different approach in the new version, incorporating Plausible to track website traffic.
Challenges
First, I got better at version control. Before this project, I found it hard to navigate GitHub, but now I know how to perform various Git functions in a terminal. I also understand how version control works and why it’s important in software development.

Secondly, I learnt the importance of speed and performance in a website. We were very intentional about the choice of framework, and compressing the images made such a big difference to page load times.

I also learnt to keep iterating until you get your desired result. Tomi and Ope were already used to this since they’ve worked together for a while, and although I’m not new to Ope’s obsession, it was my first time experiencing it on a website project.
Conclusion
While we were building this version of the website, we didn't have enough content for some of the projects to create detailed individual pages. However, the plan is to enhance the website's appearance as we continue to develop more projects.

Presently, the studio operates without a fixed structure. Ope assembles a team for each project, and his aim is to establish a network that helps independent creators in Nigeria make passion projects.

Want to work together?
Send me and email!

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