WOMAD

WOMAD - homepage

Website: womad.co.nz (site has since been redesigned) - view screenshots

Size: 60 pages, 1.7MB

My professional status: independent web designer/developer

Website client: The Edge (for WOMAD)

Dates: January 1998 - February 1999

Categories: Scoping/pitching/quoting, Client liaison, Project manager, IA & UX, Website designer, Front-end developer, Writing for the web, Content-loader, Webmaster, jQuery/JavaScript, Old-school table layout, No CMS, Medium sites

Brief: to design and build a website that would tell the world about WOMAD Aotearoa, and which could be easily added to and updated in the runup to the 1999 event.

Hi Ali! Thanks for your work. It looks great. You're a star! The photos look great too. I am really pleased with the result!

Drew James, WOMAD Event Manager and Producer

My responsibilities included:

  • Selection of a suitable ISP for the website
  • Design of website including suggestions on what the site should contain (plus look & feel, graphics, architecture, navigation, HTML encoding, feedback section, JavaScript)
  • Some content creation and regular updates
  • Ongoing client liaison.

I loved the design of this site - I like being able to use existing elements of the logo or brand image in my website designs - it maintains consistency - and this one lent itself to that very well.

I love world music and performance and so I loved doing this site for that reason too. I was lucky enough to be given a ticket to the event as a thankyou for the work I had done on the website, so I actually went to the WOMAD festival as well. Brilliant!

Awards

Computerworld magazine - Russell Brown's Website of the Week - 27 April 1998

...we have two sites even now generating a buzz for large festivals scheduled for 1999. It should be said now that there is one obvious difference between the two. The WOMAD site is drop-dead elegant and the Sweetwaters site, especially by comparison, is pug-ugly.

Perhaps the Sweetwaters folk could contact Alison Green of WebWeaver Productions, whose work for the WOMAD site is the nicest thing I've seen all year. Green has cleverly used the Aotearoa WOMAD Pacific logo as a navigational device, with each of the five letters leading to a different section of the site...

Content is basic at present, but a good set of links - including one for the coverage of last year's WOMAD festival still being hosted at Xtra - makes up for that. It will be interesting to see how much of a part WOMAD's new local internet presence plays in its next venture, but for now, the organisation hasn't put a foot wrong.

New Zealand PC World Web Guide - Hot Sites - February 1999

"Music is the universal language, there is nothing more powerful, more moving" - so opens the home page of the WOMAD festival. WOMAD stands for World of Music, Arts and Dance, and it's happening again in Auckland this year. Starting on February 26 you can see 200 artists from 20 countries in 35 hours of music and dance on five stages. The site tells you all you need to know about buying tickets with backgrounders and links to other sites on the artists attending. It also explains the WOMAD philosophy: to create awareness of the worth and potential of a multicultural society.