A quick look at the site and the code behind it painted an all too familiar picture that I keep seeing again and again: The site was build using tables (correct some time ago, absolutely wrong today) and was static in every sense of the word. As a result the Google rankings were stagnant, the site was hard to index and even harder to find and it was pretty much impossible to update without a lot of workarounds and fixes. I say this is an all too familiar sight because more and more clients come to us at Pink & Yellow Media with sites of just this type: Built with old software to old standards and often in a way that makes them almost impossible to update and manage. The bad news is these kinds of sites are pretty much writeoffs today and can actually be detremental to the success of a business, both online and in real life. The good news is you can always get a new dynamic site built and reinvigorate your online presence in the process. Which is exactly what we did with EverybodyDance.ca.

There were three major components to this project: First we needed to update the site to a modern look and make it dynamic so that Elaine and her staff could go in and change the content when they needed to. Secondly the site needed a dynamic calendar so current and prospective students could see what classes were available and when. Finally we needed to up the profile of the site through quality content, optimized code and good old fashioned marketing.

As with most of our small to medium scale projects we used WordPress as the base for this one. That way we could develop a sturdy theme with valid code and provide a platform from which Elaine and her staff could easily add, change and manage their own content. As a bonus WordPress has excellent search engine optimization built in, and with the addition of the All In One SEO Tag plugin this optimization reaches whole new levels. For the design we chose to go with the general red theme of the old site but brought it up to modern standards with a grey gradient wash in the back, more whitespace and a livelier look. The site also features a number of different page layouts depending on what type of content is displayed.

In addition to the site itself our new marketing manager Anny also developed a business and marketing platform for Elaine. Doing an analysis of current customer numbers, income and expenses Anny analyzed the growth potential of the business as a whole and made a whole range of recommendations to help boost student numbers and revenue. As part of this plan was a tiered Google AdWords and Facebook Ads strategy that will be implemented and monitored over the next year. This strategy aims to boost the rankings and visits to the site and is designed to help Vancouverites looking for a good dance school find Elaine and Everybody Dance. In a market with hundreds of options that’s not an easy task but with the new site and the new marketing strategy Elaine is guaranteed to see more eager dancers enter her school in the coming year.

And just for full disclosure: The reason I can say Elaine is a great dance instructor is because Angela and I have been going to her for 3 years and in that time we’ve gone from people who had no idea how to dance to someone who is at Silver 2 level in 12 different dances.

A new site is born

After some discussions with the gallery owners it was decided a new site was needed – one that not only drove web users directly to the shows, artists or even art pieces they were looking for, but one that also allowed the gallery to communicate more directly with the visitors through a news page and social media. But most importantly we wanted to create a site the gallery could manage on their own by adding shows, artists and photo galleries and write articles about the everyday goings on in the gallery itself. The natural platform for such a site was WordPress.

Based on the original site we knew we needed a front page, an exhibitions list displaying past, current and future shows, a gallery artist page with sub-pages for each artist, a news section, an artist submissions section, a page with info about the gallery itself and finally a contact page. Since the client is an art gallery and they had a huge number of photos of art pieces we needed to find a solution that would make the artwork easy to display for the owners and easy to navigate and digest for the visitors.

The design of the site needed to stay true to the visual identity of the gallery, built over several years. To help in the design process we brought in Alexandra Oosterom from Fresh Media Designs and she turned out a clean yet stylish look for the site that fit with the parameters we outlined.

Thinking in taxonomies

The challenge when using a CMS is always to come up with rational and logical taxonomies so different elements nest within each other in a rational way. Originally we planned on setting the site up as a huge list of parent and child static pages but that became cumbersome and blocked some of the features we wanted to include. The solution was to set up a parent category called Gallery Artists with a sub category for each of the artists. Because each artist would have a gallery plus a set of info pages (Artist Statement, Biography and Curriculum Vitae) but not all artists would have all the pages we also needed to come up with a way of creating a dynamic menu to display within each artist page that let the visitor jump from page to page quickly. The result was a clever little PHP hook within one of the post templates (yes, this site has 10 different single post templates depending on what category you are viewing and what page you got there from) that queried the parent category of the post (the artist name) and then listed out all the other posts within that category as a menu. This all came together to create a simple and intuitive navigational tool for the visitor.

Using NextGEN Gallery outside the norm

One of the interesting challenges of the site was to create a dynamic gallery artists page that featured the artist name as well as a photo of an art piece and a short bio that would in turn lead to a set of dedicated pages for that individual artist. After playing around with a few different solutions we decided to use the popular NextGEN Gallery plugin as the base for the gallery artist page. This plugin removes the process of image and gallery management from the pages and posts in WordPress and puts it in its own administration area. This makes it easier to manage large ammounts of content as was the case here. The output of NextGEN Gallery is also dymanic so a change in gallery order, image description or artist bio will be reflected on all the pages where that gallery or image is embedded with one change.

We set up one gallery for each artist that was then embedded into a separate post for that artist. To display the list of all the artists on the Gallery Artists page we used the NextGEN Gallery Album function. The problem was that the Album function only points to pages, not posts. To curb this problem we had to go in and rewrite a large bulk of the sourcecode in the plugin. After the fix each artist gallery could be related to any page or post by entering the post ID number.