The Brief
Pantheon Poets had the single aim of making the best Latin poetry accessible to people who don’t necessarily know any Latin.
The main target audience would be people studying literature in English or other modern languages, but there was also a wider purpose to make recited Latin available as a valuable resource.
The site needed to reference individual poets and poems, with each poem having its own Latin text with a literal translation, and a sound file of Latin being read aloud.
The Approach
We held a meeting via video conferencing where we discussed the brief in detail and then later sketched out the preliminary architecture of the site.
We worked on getting the feel of the site just right and produced a series of mock-ups that illustrated functionality and the user journey.
Design
We wanted a simple clean and user-friendly design with lots of white space so the poets and poems would be the focus of the site.
We combined white with flashes of black and red to be aesthetically powerful and chose a reddish grey as a pleasing soft background to the poems.
An ideal project for WordPress
To build the site we took advantage of WordPress’s specialized content types. We used custom post types for the poets and poems, and extended them with taxonomies and post object fields to create connections between poets and poems.
Secure Sound Files
The MP3 sound files are hosted on Amazon S3 servers and delivered to users at high speeds from any part of the world. They are played on the native HTML5 audio player.
