WongWorks.com

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:

www.DownHomeBluesFestival.com

Digital Journalism

Read of couple of interesting articles on the state of the newspapers.

In the first, author Mark Evans points out that journalists (and newspapers) really need to reinvent themselves.

It seems pretty obvious that the word “journalist” will soon — if it hasn’t already — mean something so much different from 10 or 20 years ago.

Gone are the days where a reporter sees something happening, rushes into the fray to the get the story, and “phones in” the “scoop”.

Today, he or she needs to know how to blog, twitter, podcast, videocast, etc. In fact, I feel the same with way myself. While my primary vocation is wedding photography, I happen to know illustration, web design, video and film editing.

Citizen Journalism?

As Evans mentions, the Internet has broke the Newspaper’s back:

• Twitter allows anyone with a mobile device to give an immediate play-by-play of what’s happening down a few houses from your pad.
• Blogs allows anyone to write more in-depth stories
• Distance becomes a moot point, as someone can focus on his or her own neck of the woods

In short, (almost) anyone can report, and they do.

But what about the Fundamental questions in Journalism?

• Who’s going to check on accuracy of the report? What if 2 people tweet something different than the other 83? There can easily be a “lemming” effect if the wrong information is tweeted.
• Which anonymous “reporter” are you going to believe in?
• What about objectivity? Critical thinking?

A Journalism Revolution Underway

In another article, author Clay Shirky likens today’s newspaper industry turmoil to the transition period in between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, pointing out Elizabeth Eisenstein’s look at what happened when Gutenburg introduced the printing press, and books and newspapers became the new way to spread information.

So it would seem that we are in our own midst of an information revolution.

Indeed, we have never been more deluged with information than we are today.

However, sifting through, sorting, verifying, and coming to depend on what information, and from who, is becoming more and more time consuming (or wasting?) task.

Perhaps this will become the realm of the “Neo”-newspapers?