In a textbook case of the cobbler’s children going barefoot, I realised today that I haven’t had time to touch the Hogtown website in months (beyond the occasional blog post). Now that’s changed, I’ve just given the portfolio page a minor makeover and added some interesting recent projects.

I won’t reprint it all here, but there is one project I haven’t mentioned which I’m particularly proud of. At the height of the re-design of the Eye Weekly website it was mentioned that Eye would really like to have something more dynamic for the website to highlight the Toronto Fringe Festival. In just under two weeks I built them a Fringe micro-site, based on a modified version of WordPress.

I wish I’d had more time to perfect it, but overall the Fringe site was a huge success. It allowed the Arts Editor to post reviews of every one of the 100+ Fringe shows within 24 hours of their first run. Also, and this was the cool bit in my opinion, it allowed visitors to the site to leave their own reviews of the shows. The site attracted huge numbers of pageviews, almost as many as the Eye Weekly homepage which is no 100lb weakling, and received 1,000+ user submitted reviews in the 10 days the Fringe runs for.

I was really pleased to see the Fringe micro-site do so well, as this type of web-specific, participatory media is something we need to see much, much more of.

I’m pleased to announce that one of Hogtown Consulting’s biggest projects to date is now live. A couple of weeks ago the Eye Weekly website was re-launched, and I was proud to have a significant part in that.

The layout and visual concept of the site was the work of Tim Emery, of Visible Media, who produced a really nice looking design under incredibly tight timelines. Pretty much everything else about the development of the site was my work, from coding the templates and migrating 10,000+ archive stories to designing and implementing the workflow process used for updating the website every week.

Overall I’m really happy with the site, as always with a new website there are some niggling problems to work out and some pieces I’d have done slightly differently with the benefit of hindsight. I think it turned out really well, particularly considering the extremely tight timelines, 2 months from first meeting to live.

More importantly that what I think, it seems like the Eye Weekly team are really happy too. The main goals were to modernise the website while providing a platform for some interesting developments in the near future, and those goals have been achieved. Stay tuned for phase 1.1.