Juxtaprose blog

We just recently finished a website for a neighbor of ours, Gary Carlson. We developed a portfolio-style site and logo/identity for his business Gary Carlson Consulting.

He does very interesting work in what he calls “business driven information management” — taking business data and translating it into concrete objectives and results. Gary was able to take his new identity (in the form of business cards) and website with him to the Taxonomy Bootcamp conference where he was a speaker.

Thanks Gary for being such a great client. We’ll see you around the neighborhood!

There’s this incredibly artful role that we sometimes call “community host” that’s still a very under appreciated aspect of what makes online community / social media “work.” So, it’s great to see this article about Heather Champ’s work as the current of Director of Community at Flickr: Nasty as they wanna be? Policing Flickr.com.

A nice little quote:

“The job always comes down to finding the fulcrum in the teeter-totter, the balance that benefits both the individual and the community,” she explains.

Next up in our site launch announcements, another sizable site we designed and built (this one, again, using Expression Engine as the CMS):

1,000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die is the official website companion to the book of the same title, by author (and NPR music critic) Tom Moon. This is the latest book in the 1,000 . . . Before You Die series, published by Workman.

While there are many things I could say about the website, I want to note right away that the 1000 Recordings book is just really fantastic, and that it’s an invaluable way both to get into more music, and to get more into music. (I’ve already posted some thoughts about the book / website from a music-lover’s perspective on my music blog.)

So, in creating the 1,000 Recordings website, we were starting with this excellent, substantial, body of writing about music. And, we began the project with creative exploration of what that might look like, in web-terms:

• what are ways this content / data could be findable, navigatable, sortable
• what are functional interactions (like “buy this CD”) that would be of immediate use alongside the text
• what are modes of participation and conversation that naturally can be woven around the communication

There were several interesting facets to this discussion: what are the different roles of the book content itself (as a “fixed” communication) vs the roles of a blog (written by the book author, Tom Moon) vs related information on other websites (e.g., Amazon reviews) vs comments and discussions that might occur on the site itself.

Additionally, we of course had to factor in business constraints around the role of the website in relationship to the book, as well as time deadlines, tasks that would be handled by staff at Workman vs our team at Juxtaprose, etc.

So, to sum that all up: the website launched with a searchable / sortable version of the list of 1000 Recordings and a subset of all of the content and data from the book. It’s now gradually getting filled out with all of the content and data—which is a lot.

Having 1,000 content- and data-rich entries requires a lot of data entry and proofreading. We actually have more than 50 fields of potential data and content for each entry, so one might think about that as 50,000 chunks of content. And we’ve had interesting situations where some aspect of the entries looked right everywhere we checked—but our representative sample of 450 entries failed to expose a content issue effecting some other set of 100 entries!

The site also now has links to buy CDs on Amazon for the vast majority of the 1,000 recordings. This was also a large undertaking, but was greatly aided by semi-automation, via Amazon Web Services. We have several more sub-projects involving music-related website APIs—look for more of that soon.

The site also launched with a blog, which allows for commenting. Almost immediately after launch, the blog started receiving good and interesting comments on Tom’s posts. We’re just about to roll-out several other commenting / discussion features, too!

I should end here by noting that Tom Moon’s blog is, itself, quite excellent. Tom’s a great writer about music and is also posting great music video finds from YouTube (today’s Sister Rosetta Tharpe video is awesome!).

We’ve had several significantly large website projects ongoing this year, and it’s time to announce the launch of one of these big new sites (yay!):

The Kaufman Center is a non-profit in New York City, that combines under one roof a world renowned concert hall (Merkin Concert Hall), a community arts school (Lucy Moses School) and an innovative public school for musically gifted kids (Special Music School). And, as a next step, after their recent architectural renovation (and, as they describe it, reinvention) of the concert hall and building façade, the Kaufman Center brought us in to similarly reinvent their presence online.

We worked closely with the Kaufman Center staff, board, teachers, parents and students. Early in the project, Anastasia and I were in New York conducting sessions with everyone to develop a broad and lasting strategy for the site. And, from that point forward, we’ve been involved in designing and developing every aspect of the site: information architecture, site content (writing, editing, proofing, content management), CMS work (selection, configuration, customization), branding and visual design, information design, graphic and photo selection, Flash design and development, HTML and CSS development, Javascript and back-end development, etc.!

The new site includes hundreds of informational pages, plus pages for each of their concert events, and for each of their music, theater and dance classes for preschoolers, children, teens and adults. Factoring in the pages for the site’s news blog, the press release blog, press image library, concert performer indexes (”tags”), and online events calendar, the new site launched with upwards of 1,000 pages. And, each year, it’s designed to regularly and significantly grow, as well.

Although, for many years, we’ve used Wordpress as our CMS of choice for smaller sites, since 2004, we’ve also been using Expression Engine (EE) for larger sites. We’re using EE a lot these days—we have several other EE sites that have recently launched, or are in the works (more on these soon). We definitely find EE a better choice for larger sites, and are also sometimes recommending it over Wordpress on some smaller sites as well.

Here are our official “site credits” for the Kaufman Center site:

Anastasia Fuller, Visual Design and Creative Lead
Jay Fienberg, Information Architect and Technical Lead
Jason Fuller, Web and Flash Developer
Eve Tonkin, Copywriter and Content Manager
Megan Anderson, Copyeditor and Content Manager

Definitely check out the new Kaufman Center site—there’s a lot to explore. And, when you’re in NYC, definitely go see a concert at Merkin Concert Hall—it’s really a fantastic hall featuring interesting performances!

As Anastasia mentioned in a recent post, we’ve been working on a big kitchen remodel at home as well as a big website at work: both of which should be done and “launched” soon. And, in both cases (kitchen and big website), we’ve been very aware of the importance of the role of architect (the building kind, and the information kind).

So, I’ve been thinking about architecture a lot every day, especially about the idea that there’s some kind of architecture in information architecture. And, I had this thought about information architecture:

The boundaries of information spaces are defined by “doors” and “windows.” Doors are entrances and exits to some information, which doors often act as through ways between some information and some other information. Windows are views of some information, generally in the context of some other information. There are no “walls” per se, only doors that are closed and/or an absence of windows.

(photo desertdoor by teachastrid on Flickr)

The practice of information architecture is all about doors and windows. Information architects design structures entirely with doors and windows. We specifically engage in the practice of design in terms of potentials and relationships between doors and windows. We work to enable the experience and understanding of information spaces, that by nature, can only be experienced or understood in terms of their doors and windows.

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This is maybe analogous to some the ideas best expressed in Andrew Hinton’s Linkosophy presentation.