Penfold Theatre
Restrictions are great because they make you more imaginative; they make you rethink things; they make you not do the obvious. —Joss Whedon
Penfold came to me because they needed a site that is highly optimized for SEO, one that has straightforward information architecture, and one that they can update and post news items with on their own. The restrictions? Time and money.
By working intimately with Penfold's founders, I was able to match up their business needs with the open source content management system MODx. But the CMS is just the beginning of all of the decisions that went into this site. This site is optimized for each of the following user groups:
Penfold's Target Market
Penfold's primary goal was to get the word out: What is Penfold? What shows are they putting on? The hierarchy of the site gets the users to this information as quickly as possible. The news feed keeps users up to date, and I set up Penfold with a FeedBurner account to assist users in subscribing to the feed. Finally, the site is coded to show up in organic search results.
Search Engines
Semantic markup is the cornerstone of my development strategy. This approach gives search engines quick access to the content of this site, thus enabling the site to be indexed efficiently.
Penfold's Founders
MODx is a modular and highly customizable CMS that is built specifically for SEO sites. I set up their framework so that Penfold's founders had the power to easily create new pages, to control those pages' position in the subnavigation, and quickly post new news items.
Future Developers
I'm not going to leave myself out of the mix, either. Penfold will inevitably need new strategies to reach their market, and when they do, I will be able to quickly update the site through the use of modular templates, chunks, and page specific variables. This site was coded not only to work in its current form, but also to be flexible to future needs and updates.
Penfold Theatre
Michael Dembicer
Avalon Student Housing
Jessica Brilli
Boston University Figure Skating Club