I’ve been working with Cassie Leedham and Chris Garrett on the launch of a great new TV production company specialising in historical crime drama-documentaries based on true stories from newspaper and library archives.
The site is now online, and we’ve been as lightweight as possible with how we ran the project:
I was creative director – putting the ideas in, working out what the site should do and how the company should appear on line, what technologies we needed, what functions users would expect, and so on.
I brought Cassie in as designer – implementing the brand, consulting with the client and acting as a point of contact for design decisions. She produced the visuals for the site based on the wireframes that we drew up in consultation meeting. Interestingly, we are only talking singular here. I’ve worked with Cassie on a few projects and it’s now possible to keep the meetings to a minimum using Basecamp and email. Shame that – because it’s always nice to meet up for a chat!
Chris was on user experience and production – he implemented the site based on Photoshop mockups from Cassie and tech choices from me, then tweaked it, added in functions, and came at things from a UX point of view.
It’s great working with a solid team of people who are skilled and reliable. My rule here is always work with great people and the work will be great. It doesn’t always hold true but in the main it’s a good rule that leads for good outcomes.
We were deliberately light on the technology too. Wordpress for the platform that the site runs on. Why? This is a startup company, and when they start getting a few more commissions coming in over the coming months they will want to be able to grow and extend the site to include features that we can’t envisage yet.
Wordpress gave us flexibility for expansion, the ability to add in extra features with ease through plugins, it’s easy enough for a beginner to pick up and start publishing, and it’s reasonably secure and fast. There are ‘better’ systems out there, but for rapid development Wordpress can’t be beaten.
Don’t be complicated when it comes to hosting video.
I toyed with the idea of using Brightcove or hosting video using FTP and some kind of Flash player. The problem is it’s too complicated for a client. With Vimeo offering full HD web playback it was pretty obvious to use them for hosting the videos on the site.
Embed interesting stuff using standard tools.
We’re using Flickr and open source Flash objects for displaying photos (gallery coming soon), and the rule is that if you can just grab something to use from elsewhere it’s better than building something from scratch.
Link to and use social networks. This is the next phase – we’ve got a Facebook group (not sure if this will be any use nowadays), and there’ll be a bunch of different services that the site will hook into – LinkedIn, IMDB, oh and most of this stuff is free.
What I’ve learnt: don’t use Windows hosting for Wordpress just because you have it set up. The latest version doesn’t install on Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), so a lesson for next time is to make sure we go with Linux hosting.
All in – a neat, rapidly developed site for a startup in around three weeks end to end.
@Tony - thanks for the tip. If only you could hit reply and it leave a comment on basecamp...
Tony Locarno
As too keeping meetings to the minimum - it's good. But Basecamp and email are not the best solution. Basecamp is not integrated with email. Unfortunately :(
I found a tool that doesthough. You might want to check it out.
Archive TV Launches
The Crime Wave from Archive TV on Vimeo.
I’ve been working with Cassie Leedham and Chris Garrett on the launch of a great new TV production company specialising in historical crime drama-documentaries based on true stories from newspaper and library archives.
Appropriately, it’s called Archive TV, and it’s headed up by Sharon Holloway.
The site is now online, and we’ve been as lightweight as possible with how we ran the project:
I was creative director – putting the ideas in, working out what the site should do and how the company should appear on line, what technologies we needed, what functions users would expect, and so on.
I brought Cassie in as designer – implementing the brand, consulting with the client and acting as a point of contact for design decisions. She produced the visuals for the site based on the wireframes that we drew up in consultation meeting. Interestingly, we are only talking singular here. I’ve worked with Cassie on a few projects and it’s now possible to keep the meetings to a minimum using Basecamp and email. Shame that – because it’s always nice to meet up for a chat!
Chris was on user experience and production – he implemented the site based on Photoshop mockups from Cassie and tech choices from me, then tweaked it, added in functions, and came at things from a UX point of view.
It’s great working with a solid team of people who are skilled and reliable. My rule here is always work with great people and the work will be great. It doesn’t always hold true but in the main it’s a good rule that leads for good outcomes.
We were deliberately light on the technology too.
Wordpress for the platform that the site runs on. Why? This is a startup company, and when they start getting a few more commissions coming in over the coming months they will want to be able to grow and extend the site to include features that we can’t envisage yet.
Wordpress gave us flexibility for expansion, the ability to add in extra features with ease through plugins, it’s easy enough for a beginner to pick up and start publishing, and it’s reasonably secure and fast. There are ‘better’ systems out there, but for rapid development Wordpress can’t be beaten.
Don’t be complicated when it comes to hosting video.
I toyed with the idea of using Brightcove or hosting video using FTP and some kind of Flash player. The problem is it’s too complicated for a client. With Vimeo offering full HD web playback it was pretty obvious to use them for hosting the videos on the site.
Embed interesting stuff using standard tools.
We’re using Flickr and open source Flash objects for displaying photos (gallery coming soon), and the rule is that if you can just grab something to use from elsewhere it’s better than building something from scratch.
Link to and use social networks. This is the next phase – we’ve got a Facebook group (not sure if this will be any use nowadays), and there’ll be a bunch of different services that the site will hook into – LinkedIn, IMDB, oh and most of this stuff is free.
What I’ve learnt: don’t use Windows hosting for Wordpress just because you have it set up. The latest version doesn’t install on Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), so a lesson for next time is to make sure we go with Linux hosting.
All in – a neat, rapidly developed site for a startup in around three weeks end to end.