Nashville Interactive recently launched a fresh website redesign for country music artist Amanda Nagurney. Amanda needed a website that reflected her maturing career and that could be updated easily. The solution was a self-hosted, open-source content management system. This means that Amanda controls her own website and doesn't have to worry about being locked-in to proprietary software which often involve fairly hefty fees for hosting, ongoing maintenance and licensing. We're very proud of this one turned out. A great example of a self-managed musician website design that is flexible and allows for easy content management. Check out Amanda's new site at amandanagurney.com
Nashville Interactive is proud to have been a part of GuardYourBuddy.com. The website is dedicated to helping our troops in the TN National Guard cope with the huge life changes that accompany their service. The primary goal of the website is suicide prevention while also providing resources to help manage the various aspects of life that can quickly become overwhelming these days. Nashville Interactive handled the design on this particular project. Check it out at www.guardyourbuddy.com
Nashville Interactive is proud to present elliotroot.com for your viewing pleasure. ER is a great up and coming group with "roots" (pun semi-intended) in Kenosha Wisconsin. These guys are not your typical Nashville artists. Great music so visit the site and have a listen (and check out the design while you're there).
Nashville Interactive is proud to have had the opportunity to venture into the horse farm website design world with a recent project for Rising Star Ranch. RSR is a Tennessee Walking Horse Breeding Farm located in Shelbyville, TN. The project entailed website design and development and a complete overhaul of their existing site. RSR needed a flexible way to easily manage content including keeping their stallions, news and classified ads up-t0-date. The solution was a WordPress website design. WordPress is a great Content Management System for small to mid-sized website development. You can check out the brand-new Rising Star Ranch website design here: www.attherisingstar.com
Nashville Interactive recently designed, developed and launched bebelmont.com. A website that helps students, alumni and faculty of Belmont University tell their real-world stories. The site has some really great features including ajax-based post sorting on the submissions page, a nice carousel of recent posts on the home page and a robust submission form allowing users to submit their stories, photos, videos and audio files. The website is one of the primary focal points of the beBELMONT campaign which will include TV, billboards, print and online advertising. Check it out at bebelmont.com.
A long time since the last post here at NI. Things have been very busy all spring and summer is shaping up to be just as great. Nashville Interactive has been lucky enough to work on a bunch of great music venue websites and a few fair and event websites as well during this time. These numerous, sub-contracted projects include The Orange Peel (Asheville, NC), Headliners (Louisville, KY), Hat Factory (Richmond, VA), State Fair of West Virginia (uhhh), Allegan Co. Fair (Allegan, MI), Flavor! Napa Valley (CA), Legendary Cherokee (NC), and a few others. Website design was done for all of these sites as well as key front-end development.
So back to the point… Arenas are dead. Going to see an artist in a smaller, more intimate setting is where it's at. The state (and county) fair is where it's at. Helping these people shine and achieve goals via websites is also where it's at.
This week marks the launch of three websites which Nashville Interactive has played an integral role in. We were lucky enough to be involved in the development of NBA star Rajon Rondo's new website, as well as the design and development of TaiganFinds.com – a blog devoted to finding that great online boutique shopping deal – and design and development of SmartGrow.us – a site where users can purchase organic growing materials (made of human hair!).
While Nashville Interactive can't take credit for the sleek design on Rajon's new site, we're still proud to have been able to perform the build via an open-source content management system to help assist the record-breaking Star. The site has some great features for fans with more to come in the near future as well. Check it out at www.rajonrondo9.com.
Taigan Finds is a blog that features fashion news, style trends and great shopping finds at Taigan.com – an online shopping site with exclusive access to high-end boutique retailers. Nashville Interactive worked closely with the Taigan marketing department to produce TaiganFinds.com. A site that looks and feels as refined as the boutique shops which it features. The blog features some great social network integration to help aggregate content more effectively.
If you're into gardening, plants and Mother Earth, you'll want to check out SmartGrow.us. SmartGrow is a line of organic growing products made from human hair! I know, It may sound a bit icky at first but if you think about where most other traditional fertilizers come from (think cow pastures), it's really not bad at all. Plus the product is 100% all-natural and biodegradable. Nashville Interactive provided a much needed face lift to the SmartGrow site as well as a fully integrated online store to improve the buying experience. Ecommerce website design and development is almost essential these days as more and more users flock to their computers to handle their shopping needs.
So all-in-all a very busy week (and several weeks leading up to it). There's much more website design on the horizon so stay tuned by subscribing to the NI RSS feed or by signing up for email updates.
The children are our future. Teach them well and let them… benefit from your volunteer activities. Nashville Interactive recently designed and performed a large portion of the front-end build for the newly launched schoolvolunteers.org. The site is a tool used by volunteers and coordinators to log and track hours as well as for posting and finding new volunteer opportunities. The target demographic for this particular website design dictated that the site have a very quick load time while retaining a professional and branded look. The site uses sparse and well optimized images and relies on web-safe fonts and css backgrounds for most of the design. The target users are also almost exclusively using various versions of Internet Explorer, including our old friend IE6. This meant that backward compatibility was a must for this project. The site is a great resource for a great cause and will be a great resource for users.
The summer of 2010 will go down as one crazy summer of web design. Nashville Interactive has been very busy with some great projects that will hit the web design portfolio soon. Being busy with nice, air-conditioned office work during a very hot and humid Middle Tennessee summer isn't a bad thing at all. Since the real heat started in June, Nashville Interactive has played an integral part in over one dozen website design projects including work for music mogul Diddy, professional golfer Kenny Perry, country music artist and professional bull rider Justin McBride and Nashville School Volunteers. There's plenty more on the horizon slated for the fall so hopefully we'll be able to find some time for football and leaf raking. Stay tuned for design portfolio updates in the near future…
The battle is pretty much over between Facebook and Myspace and Facebook took the title hands down. Myspace still has many millions of users but Facebook is the heavy-weight these days. So what does this tell us about the average web user today? It tells us (or me anyway) that people prefer a good user experience over complete freedom of expression through their own personalized web page design. Myspace gives you the freedom to create a completely unique webpage of your own, including custom images, Flash animation and control over styles via CSS (cascading style sheets). That's pretty much all the average user could ask for in a social networking page. But apparently most people don't care about complete freedom of expression through page design; they'd rather have a better user experience in a controlled environment. Of course Facebook's "better user experience" is just an opinion but the numbers seem to justify that opinion.
Another factor is that people who aren't artistically inclined can be intimidated when confronted with complete freedom of design. It could be that the average user felt that Facebook's simpler approach leveled the playing field. No longer are users forced to "compete" for the cooler looking page. With Facebook, everyone is playing by the same rules. It's more about the content than the unique presentation of information. Both Facebook and Myspace have powerful platforms for social interaction though Facebook is very easy to use and has much less clutter than Myspace which in my opinion is why it has become the leader in online social networking.
The Nashville Interactive designed and developed scripture-lullabies.com has officially launched! This was a great project to work on. The site design is one that definitely made the web design portfolio and the development portion of the project is a perfect example of how open-source software allows for all the power and flexibility of a proprietary CMS. The site has an e-commerce aspect that allows the client to sell and manage their products directly from the site. The project also included a promotional marketing video created in After Effects. The video and the site have already become some of my favorite work of late but there's much more website and graphic design work on the horizon so stay tuned!
(oh yeah, and if you have kids, this CD is a great one to play at bedtime so check it out.)
Nashville Interactive recently designed, built and launched alwayssisterforeverbrothers.com. This website for the 2010 Always Sisters Forever Brothers Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, proved to be a great project to work on. The site design awarded Nashville Interactive the opportunity to use some pretty cool javaScript and front-end development techniques. The website features a scrolling "homepage" that creates a nice, cohesive experience for viewing the top-level content. Much care was taken to ensure that the browser back and forward buttons would work with this design and more importantly that deep linking to all the top level content within the scrollable sections would work across all the major web browsers.
The site utilizes WordPress as a content management system which allows the client to take full control of their website and in-turn the message they want to put in front of their audience. Empowering clients to control their website's content is good website design, and this sort of self sustainability is part of Nashville Interactive's primary mission.
If you're one of those people who loves to empower your friends and family to make their own gift decisions via gift cards, this might be the site for you. Nashville Interactive did a portion of the front-end development work on givecard.com and got the chance to work with some great people. This site allows users to give a gift card to a recipient, a portion of which goes to charity. The recipient of the card can give more to charity if they'd like and they can choose from hundreds of charities to donate to. A great site for some great causes so check it out now.
Nashville Interactive recently completed a custom Flash design project for the world-renown Gaylord Entertainment. The client wanted a Flash-based landing page that was tied in with email marketing campaigns. The end product was a completely customizable experience that included a photo slideshow with accompanying text for each image. The all-Flash landing pages are easily "re-skinned" with xml and image replacement making them extremely flexible and quickly edited. While I've become an advocate of more "traditional" methods for web development, I always enjoy diving into some custom Flash Design.
