The Comedy Barn

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.