Our last website (the purple one) is 4 years old and was designed by a computer programmer friend who knew nothing about dance and
little about design. Because dancing is such an aesthetic appeal activity, it was really improtant to us that we were confident that
the visual representation of the website accurately represented the aesthetics of our dance and our style.
I've always
been a fan of bold, clean geometrics. Since our last website was cool colours with white text, I wanted to go with a refreshing switch:
bright, warm colours. After much research, I discovered that many websites in the arts & entertainment field were done on a black
background. I liked the sleek, sexy, clean look and thought it would frame the dance photos really well. Black also feels a little
more intimate, like you're peeking into our scrapbook or a theatre program, instead of walking into a cold, sterile, flourescent-lit
department store. I changed it to charcoal to give it a softer look, not as plastic. What about Myles, you ask? He knows to leave
the "design stuff" to me - he trusts that I will come up with something that he loves, and just wants to be involved in the decisions
like "which looks better, A or B?"
One of the problems I faced from our old site was the challenge of organizing multiple chunks
of info on the same page. The red, orange, and yellow boxes allowed me to arrange headings and sub-headings in a way that made it
really obvious where the information started and ended. By stacking the blocks imperfectly, I made it easy for the reader's eye to
trail down the page, instead of being distracted and wondering what to look at first.
The home page is actually a portal page
which has links to our 4 websites. Extreme Swing Club and Your First Dance are ready to go, but West Coast Swing Canada is yet to
be launched. I am currently working on that one.
The menu idea I borrowed from a template I liked, but I still had to create
it from scratch.
The use lower case titles are just a modern twist to spice up the arial font, which I chose for its clean lines
and consistency across browsers.
The use of quotes at the bottom of each page and each page's menu serve to illustrate our philosophies
on dance and life. It was very important to us to include these, because as artists and teachers, we want to share our motivations
and inspirations with our students and peers. We are both collectors of inspirational quotes, and have done lots of personal work,
and we wanted that to show through.
The video clips were the hardest element. Myles did the editing and compression for me, and
after many trials and errors, I figured out how to put them up. Of course, like anything, it was way simpler than I was making it.
The
Press Kit was an element that was long overdue - many media reps and event promoters have asked for the type of things I have provided
on the Press Kit page, but I always had to assemble them and/or write them from scratch. After seeing the website of Comedian Daniel
Packard who worked for us at BCDC, I decided I just had to include a press kit of our own.
The Casting page was simple - Casting
Directors don't know dancing, so to make their job easier so they don't have to sift through results and wonder what they mean, they
get their own page to look at in their language.
Instead of having random photos everywhere, I created a designated Media page
to store them all, sorted by purpose. To cut down on page load time, I made them thumbnails which can be enlarged to full size.
Splitting
up the Live and Digital Instruction pages were a no-brainer - we now 7 videos for sale and the new Live Webcast concept. We teach
multiple formats of live instruction for multiple groups of students. The Choreography page stood on its own because of the success
of our performance teams, film work, wedding dance website, and competitiors' choreography.
It was very important to us to include
a personal piece describing our committment, goals, mission statement, etc. We wanted people to feel like they knew us before they
met us. We wanted to put it all on the table.
We are both very excited to finally have a virtual home that illustrates both us
and our dance accurately.
