https://www.liannelahavas.com/

The very talented Lianne La Havas needed a fairly simple but classy web presence at this early stage in her career.

We decided to build a clean holding page for her site and use the very popular Tumblr platform to power her blog. Kate Brighouse designed the two holding page and blog which I converted into a custom Tumblr theme.

The holding page is a static html page with three embedded videos, a free download widget, a sign-up form and tour dates. The sign-up form uses jQuery to validate the email field and submit the form without leaving the page while the tour dates are pulled in from the BandsInTown Facebook app and then formatted with the custom CSS styles I set up for the page.

To get started with the Tumblr theme, I used Minimalist as a template and adjusted it. Kate’s design was wider than the Tumblr default so I had to make a number of adjustment to account for that.

To ensure that videos are displayed at full width (rather than the default 500px) I used two Javascript functions. Matthew Buchanan’s script handles YouTube while some Javascript from Alex Hallajian resizes videos embedded from Vimeo.

I configured AddThis to place customized sharing buttons for Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr on every post.

The design also required a specific font for the post titles so I configured Cufon to make sure that the headings and menu items always looks great, whilst also degrading gracefully for browsers that don’t support Javascript.

The Lianne La Havas website and blog look very basic, but have a fair bit going on to ensure that the stylish design is always maintained.