“The Fighter” has been getting a lot of great reviews and press lately and if you look closely, you can see Christian Bale, who portrays Lowell boxing legend Dick Eklund in the film, sporting a shirt that says Dickeklund.com.
By a stroke of luck, a client of mine also worked as a grip on The Fighter and since he’s a local boxer as well, he and Dicky really hit it off and he offered to find Dicky some help with getting a web site together for his training business. One thing that became apparent right away was the need to showcase all the testimonials that Dicky’s students had about his training method. The JQuery Featured Content Gallery plugin was a great solution for putting as much content as possible on the page without taking up a lot of real estate. Out of curiosity’s sake, I went with the default “Twenty Ten” theme and styled it into the page below.
The header contains the JQuery Featured Content rotating banner images which rotate to show the various testimonials along with a photo of the person quoted.
It’s a great plugin to work with. The instructions are easy and fairly self-evident. There’s an option to link each banner to a different page and the styling and sizing are a breeze. Warning, it’s so easy to use, I have to restrain myself from using it everywhere.
When I first took the project on, it mainly because I had actually worked a couple of days on the film and I thought it would be fun to do a site that connected to another area of my life. I totally didn’t expect Christian Bale to throw his weight behind it and start wearing Dickeklund.com swag everywhere! He was fascinating to work around. I don’t think he ever “broke” character and he’s hugely supportive of Dicky. At one point, when the courtroom scene was being filmed, a production assistant accidentally dropped a clipboard that fell onto Bale as he was waiting for his cue. Everyone froze, probably thinking he would go off on another Youtube rant sensation but instead he turned to the quaking kid and said “Hey buddy, ya trying put a hit on me?” in a flawless Lowell accent. The site’s doing really well thanks to his support and I hope it brings Dicky some new fighters to train!
