Web Development

OVERVIEW

This project was a true labor of love, because in the late 90's I had lived and worked at Prairie Sun Recording Studios in Cotati. It is an amazing high-energy, laidback atmosphere, world-class recording studio that has worked with thousands of name-brand and unknown talents to produce some of the most energetic and competent, quality recordings on the planet. Even though Prairie Sun is located on a 12 acre chicken ranch in Cotati, it boasts some uncredible talent which has helped sign many artists and launch and perpetuate many careers

MISSION

The owner "Mooka" approached me to produce a state-of-the-art website that would allow his staff the ability to add, update and change content at will - without having to be web-nerds to do it. Wordpress was too difficult and Wix was not yet at the development level to rival Weebly, so, I recommended Weebly as the platform to use.

Weebly, affords the ability to incorporate a good looking design environment, with the ease of use needed, so they could change and modify things on the fly. They've even had some of their recording engineers change and add content, after I came up with the initial design.

Some may say that using platforms like Weebly, Wix and WordPress is cheating, when it comes to web development, but given the requirements and the steep learning curve of platforms like WordPress and the time constraints of learning to code HTML, CSS, Javascript, the client found it much more palateable that we deploy using Weebly.com. In addition, for me, using the Weebly platform cut the development time by 50-70% at least.

DEVELOPMENT NOTES

Initial design was performed by picking and choosing which template would be closest to what a professional recording studio would need to showcase the actuals studios, gear and engineers

The staff provided me with photos and I used Photoshop to prepare see-through gifs for logos by clipping them from their digital artwork. I optimized the images for faster loading and created mockups in 2-3 days.

The staff were extremely grateful for the speed with which I was able to deploy the site, as they had been putting off getting a website for years, for fear it was going to be an exhaustive and laborious process.

Using Weebly was easy and the entire project took only 3 weeks of actual work spread out over two months due to the studio's busy schedule. We only needed about 4 face-to-face meetings and the remainder of communications was done via telecommuting, email and phone conversations.

The client was pleased and there were smiles all around when the project was completed. I was extremely proud o have once again assisted my former colleagues and associates in this endeavor.