Win City

The American Advertising Federation in Louisville needed a dedicated website for its annual awards show, along with a reusable portfolio system capable of supporting the event year after year. I designed and developed a custom WordPress platform that balanced event-driven visual storytelling with long-term structural flexibility, creating a site that could reflect each year’s creative theme while maintaining a scalable foundation for future iterations.

The homepage was designed to bring each year’s awards experience to life while still fitting within a system built for reuse. Rather than treating the site as a one-off event build, the project focused on creating a structure that could evolve annually without requiring the entire platform to be rebuilt. This allowed the site to maintain creative impact while also improving efficiency behind the scenes.

Beyond the front-end experience, I built a structured portfolio system that allows submissions, winners, and archival content to be organized and reused from year to year. This gave the organization a more sustainable framework for managing awards content over time and made the platform more valuable beyond a single event cycle. The result was a system that supports both presentation and long-term content management in a more streamlined way.

To introduce a dynamic element tied to place and time, I integrated the OpenWeather API. The homepage environment adapts to real-time weather conditions in Louisville, with visual transitions reflecting sunrise, daytime, sunset, and nighttime states. This created a subtle but distinctive experiential layer that reinforced local identity without compromising performance. It also added a more immersive quality to the homepage while keeping the design aligned with the broader event experience.

The result is a flexible, event-focused custom WordPress platform designed to evolve each year while maintaining creative impact, operational efficiency, and a stronger foundation for organizing and showcasing awards content over time.