art@sidcot

This is the new art@sidcot website, developing... I am keen on a very simple initial page, with an ‘artroom’ theme. The page is still under construction, although the main elements are now in place, there is some tweaking to be done on the design.

My main aim is to create a page that students will want to visit on a regular basis - and I have build three device in to the front page that I hope will encourage this. Firstly the pencil line across the top, which is 'drawn' by the pencil when the page is first accessed. My plan is to have a short animation playing when the site first opens, and to change this animation on a regular basis. There might be someone tightrope walking, or washing hanging from the line, a bouncing ball, or a caterpillar. The idea is a combination of that used by Google, and the Aardman animations. I may include some interactivity into this device - the caterpillar might change into a butterfly when clicked for example.

One of the features of our new arts block is it's cedar cladding. We are creating a website for the arts centre, that will feature this cedar cladding as a back ground image, so the tatty cladding on the art site is a visual play on this device.

The second device is the twitter feed, which can be updated directly from an iphone. This will become a running commentary on the life of the department, and is scrollable so that the history of the term will sit on this front page. Being a twitter feed, students will also be able to subscribe to this.
Thirdly the image, that will be changed weekly, featuring either snapshots of life in the department, or students artwork. Clicking on 'suggest a caption' brings up a pop up window where students can make suggestions. These come directly to me for vetting, and the best will be put up on the site.

Most websites have the navigation bar at the top. I have tried to reproduce the feel of Apple's 'Dock' by placing the main navigation at the bottom of the page. Each 'tool' represents a distinct section of the site, and within each section sub menus and bread crumb trail are a more normal list in a sidebar to the left.

One of the tools will take the visitor directly to our weekly departmental blog, which retains the look of the whole site. Another tool will take the visitor directly to a more normal home page, which will act as site map come index.

The home page has been created in Flash. On the content pages, we are using a Flash feed to draw in the artistic font, so that we can get away from the constraints of using web safe fonts. This means that the site should look as we intend on any browser running the latest Flash player.

The bulk of the site is created in such a way that content can be added and updated directly on line.

Very cool...