Scenario Writing Studio was a redesign for an author/screenwriter with whom we’d worked before on True Story Ink. There was a lot of content on her existing site, but it wasn’t managed very well, was not very search engine friendly, and was impossible for her to make even minor changes without having to get access to the code and use an FTP program. What’s more, certain features she wanted to offer — like the ability to create an RSS feed for updates — would be impossible on the static site she had been given. We’d proposed when we started working with her to redo the entire site in WordPress, and the launch of her new book and ghostwriting seminar was the perfect opportunity to do it.
Like True Story Ink, the site was to have a strong film noir feel, but it also needed to be obviously a site for an author. The design we went with is really all about light and dark, and in that way, carries a strong film noir aesthetic. One of the things the old site had was two sidebars that varied depending on what page you were looking at. It was used to navigate sub-sections of pages, offer more information relevant to the current page, or give contact information. For the redesign, we created a similar feature, building 15 pairs of sidebars for various pages, making them all widgetized (and therefore, fully customizable from the back-end), and all called from a single generic page template using a series of if statements (e.g. if this page, display this set of sidebars).
We designed customized graphics for her social networking links, and customized “enroll” PayPal buttons for her online classes to fit with the design of the site. We wanted everything to fit with the mood of the site and Netflix’d Chinatown to give us some extra visual inspiration in the early development of the site design.
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