#145: Intro to The Lodge (Private Access Area)

(Updated on )

We’ve done a little prep for this new “Private Access Area” on CSS-Tricks. We’ve looked at WordPress plugins to help us, we’ve even decided on one and set it up. But now we need to get into actually building the front end. We’re going to call it “The Lodge”. Funnily enough, as a viewer you already know all about it since you’re logged in and watching this video right now, but at the time of this screencast, it wasn’t built yet!

For starters, we’ll need to have a homepage for The Lodge. It will essentially be a sales page explaining what it is, what you get as a member, how cool it is, how much it costs, etc. It will likely link to a signup page. Then each individual series (this entire redesigning thing would be just one series, planning for more) would have a sub-home kind of page.

Another thing we’ll have to do is make a module for the homepage. As it is, there is no way to get to The Lodge from the homepage and that’s no good. We’ll probably expose a login form right there to make it easy for existing members.

As we get started with the branding, we go buy a photo from iStockPhoto of an old wintery cabin. I just like it. It feels like a lodge to me and yearns back to my Wisconsin roots =). More specifically, I like the way there is a horizontal strip of interestingness in the photo that we can use as a header.

Plenty to do!