08/2/06
Project Description:
My third project for the Fee / Hedrick Family Entertainment Group was to redesign the website for The Comedy Barn Theater. The old site was fairly simply, full of unnecessary spacer gifs, lacked alt & image tags, used images for plain text, and was just all-around an SEO turtle. It needed a bit more character, cleaned up, and tweaked for search engines.
I have to admit that this is the last site with tables that I have created. I have since moved to using solid XHTML and CSS based layouts. Even with tables, I managed to do away with the spacer gifs and cleaned the code up substantially. The first thing that I dis was add color to the design. The background is now blue and the top is a bright red barn roof with a Flash animation of the logo and the characters that pop up beside it. It creates an immediate “fun” emotion when opening the site.
Other changes are:
- The menu was cleaned up with sharper rollover images and text
- The paragraphs of text are no long images. This allows search engines to see the keywords
- Links to other shows & theaters were added to provide cross-linking strength
- 30 second commercial added in Flash format
- Online ticketing integrated (Online ticketing was not created by me. I had practically no control over the functionality and a lot of the user interface. I just linked to it and tried to make its pages look the same as the rest of the site.)
Click here to see the before and after screenshots.
Project Details:
The Comedy Barn was created with the following:
- Macromedia Dreamweaver
- Adobe Photoshop
- Flash 8
- EditPlus
- CSS, ASP, Access
Site Address:
Launched:
Shane Eubanks
