SGTrains is a community of railway enthusiasts formed in 2011. Apart from being active in the local transport scene through participation and feedback, SGTrains also maintains a website documenting and sharing information about Singapore’s rail network.
I designed and developed SGTrains’ new website, and helped craft the group’s new brand identity.
The new website, apart from being more comprehensive and visually appealing, also reduced technical complexity compared to the previous forum-based website. The new brand identity also gave the group a more professional image.
Tech
The previous SGTrains website was written as webpages that extend from the forum software. This meant the website was dependent on the forum, and any forum downtime would bring down the website too.
The new website is a static website, with the exception of the homepage which uses PHP. The website styles build upon a modified, lightweight build of Bootstrap.
The choice to go with a static HTML website and Bootstrap was made to simplify the website, and to make it easier to maintain with basic tools and with less dependencies.
A later addition to the website was the Travel Guide section, which included First & Last Train Timings. As an open API for train network information was not available from LTA, a tool was written in Python to scrape and transform data from LTA’s MyTransport website into a JSON file used by the page.
For collaboration with others on the project, Git was used as the source control system with a central repository set up.
Design
To complement the launch of a new website, a new logo was designed.
A style guide was also created to aid the team in creating content with a consistent style, covering elements from colours, logo guidelines and font types, to the editorial tone to use in writing.
Gallery
Home page
Content pages
