Website Revamp: Down Home Blues Festival
I’m pleased to announce a recent revamp of DownHomeBluesFestival.com
Down Home Blues Festival is an annual workshop dedicated to blues dancing, and is sponsored by the Northern California Lindy Society.
Here’s the final look:
Here’s the before image:
The Initial Problem
Two things jumped out at me with the old site:
It took up a fixed amount of space – with today’s monitors favoring the widescreen format, and coming in various sizes, including large, larger and Ginormica!, we really were not utilizing monitor real estate efficiently.
It took a long time to update – The Down Home Blues Festival has been taking place every year, and it’s always taken a bit more time than I’d like to update the site with that particular year’s information partly because I was always “manually” updating and formatting each page as needed.
In addition, there are many pieces of the site revamp to wait for: logo design, updated biographies, schedules, dances, etc. And often times, I prefer to blast through a sizeable update in one sitting, instead of doing it piecemeal.
Of course, because a workshop of this magnitude requires a lot of coordination on the organizer’s part, there is inevitably a wait. Understandably so.
Still, I wanted to find a solution that would eventually make updating the site a more pleasurable experience for all involved: the organizers, me the webmaster, and ultimately, the dancers who are visiting the site to register for the workshop.
Solution
What I finally decided was to install WordPress, and to use that as the main CMS (Content Managemen System). More and more sites are using WordPress on their backend, including this one, and some sites, in fact, do not even look like blogs.
In any case, once I decided on that route, the next step was to create an updated logo.
Here’s the old one:
I did not have access to the original design file, so what I did was us Photoshop to trace the house with the path tool and then added in the new text, utilizing my own design sensibilities from my Graphic Communications days in my early college “career”.
The result is this:
I reduced the height of the logo to decrease the amount of header real estate that would be taken up.
After the logo was done, then it was a matter of created the pages and populating them with the appropriate content.
There you have it — a quick and dirty run-down on a “simple” website revamp.
Check it out at:
