Website Building: Paper and Tape

As HIT is gearing up for it's two upcoming productions, we're working on how to present ourselves to the public, which of course dips into the first big project of any upstart company:

Our Website.

We are fortunate enough to have a fantastic designer, Nora Merecicky, as our web guru.  While she is able to create a bonanza of beauty, it became clear that the marketing group had to pull our weight and decide what we wanted on the website in the first place.

So yesterday Sarah, Ben, Elana & I got together to discuss the logistics of placement, drop-down menus verses single-link clickables, the home page location, icons verses textual buttons, etc.

Ben had a brilliant idea of literally looking at websites we liked, which evolved into a discussion on theatre websites we liked.  We loved the homepage for The Actors Theatre of Louisville, but got overwhelmed by the amount of information within all secondary menus.  Moth Theatre (not to be mistaken for The Moth theatre) had a website that was beautiful but we were discouraged by the menus-within-menus that took extra time to load.

By the end of the meeting it became clear that it was no easy feat to have a clear, concise, aesthetically pleasing, hip and easy-to-navigate-website.  All websites we looked at had their pros and cons--there was no "one perfect website" out there, especially in theatre.

So, we did what any group of twenty-somethings do when under pressure:

Arts and Crafts!

Sarah and Elana's hand during our impromptu website assembly line

Excitement doesn't begin to describe mapping out websites with paper and marker

I was really excited to Get Involved.

We basically pulled an afternoon brainstorm of the main menus we like and the submenus we have to have ready for viewership, come our debut into the world wide web.

The first draft of our website's layout:

All that's left now is...well...everything else.  But, it was an exciting start.  More soon!

-Beryl