This year I joined a business organization through my college called PBL. A few of my friends convinced me that it was fun and that it was an opportunity for professional development.

Every year the national organization hosts a competition with a variety of events that range from impromptu speaking to network security. Although the organization focuses mostly on business they also support tech.

The one event I knew I wanted to participate in was the website design event. The prompt for this year was to make a website for a resort in your hometown. My entire team was attending Milwaukee School of Engineering, so we chose Milwaukee as our hometown.

Due to an unfortunate miscommunication mishap, we learned about our prejudging submission deadline for the state competition three days before the due date. As a team, we went into overdrive and threw together a basic site on Github Pages. Thankfully our hard work paid off and we were able to take first place at the state level.

After the state competition, we wanted to put some more work into our website in preparation for the national competition to create a more solid brand. So we brainstormed as a team and came up with the idea of creating a rustic craft brewery themed resort.

Milwaukee has a big craft brewery theme and has at least 3 breweries in the downtown location. Milwaukee is also big supporter of Wisconsin brands like New Glarus and Leinenkugels.

To build our updated site, we used a framework called Materialze.css and we used a third party component called Full Calendar to connect to Google Calendar so that we could customize the calendar display of local events.

I would estimate that we put in about a full week's worth of work towards this project. Our finished website can be viewed here.

We ended up taking our website design to the PBL national conference and taking first place! I love how the site turned out and it was a lot of fun to work as a team to come up with a brand strategy and design.