Young Wordsmiths

Young Wordsmiths is an online magazine run by Lekha Ink, a writing center and children’s book publisher. Lekha started Young Wordsmiths to publish writing and occasional video presentations by writing center students. The site engages a wider audience in the writings of young people. It also shows the results of Lekha’s camps and classes, thereby promotes their programs.

I created the site to support the existing Lekha branding, while letting the content take the lead. Student work is displayed along images if available. I coded custom taxonomies for each submission. The student’s age, educational path, program, location, and teacher are presented as links to all student work within that category. With this rich navigation, users find work of their greatest interest and see the level of work created at the Lekha Writing Center according to each criterion.

Each student entry includes the student’s name in the byline. Because Lekha is publishing through teacher accounts, rather than granting an account to each student, the byline had to be custom coded to present author name.

I coded a custom student directory and designed ads to publicize Lekha’s published books and educational opportunities on the site.