Description
Consulting, UX / UI, Website Design, WordPress Development, Hosting, Support
Time-Span
3 Months
Background
Putty Dance Project is a husband-and-wife company: dancer and choreographer Lauren Putty White, a professor at Stockton University, and musician and composer Brent White, a professor at Drexel. Together they create original works on social consciousness that combine live jazz, multimedia and jazz dance improvisation, often followed by conversations with the audience.
Their old website had little worth keeping, and they needed an easy way to keep upcoming performances current.
Objectives
Goals for the new site:
- Introduce the company, its mission and the artists behind it
- Give Lauren and Brent a simple way to add and update performances
- Keep an archive of past productions
- Showcase the full creative team with individual bios
- Support donations through the company's fiscal sponsor
Challenges
A performing arts company's website is only as good as its calendar. Shows change, new dates get added and older ones need to move into an archive without anyone hand-editing pages.
Content for more than a dozen dancers and musicians also arrived over several weeks, so the site had to be easy to fill in as bios and photos came together.
Discovery & Planning
We planned the site around what visitors come to do: see what's coming up, learn about the company and its artists, watch their work and support it.
Design Phase
A bold, high-contrast design with layered color bands and big performance photography reflects the energy of the company's work. The home page leads with the mission and a What's Coming Up feed.
Events & Archive
Performances run on an events calendar Lauren and Brent manage themselves. Upcoming shows appear on the home page, and past productions roll into an archive that now goes back to 2014.
Creative Team
The Creative Team page links to individual bio pages for about 13 dancers and musicians, alongside video and photo galleries, a press page and a Support page for donations.
Launch & Support
Development kicked off in February 2024 and the site launched in May 2024. We set up their YouTube channel for the video gallery, redirected their extra domains and trained them to edit the site, and we've hosted and supported it since, including SEO setup and Cloudflare.
