Target Audience
Rockstar Productions is a website for a night life promotion company based out of LA and Orange County. The website targets young male and females ages 21-26 that like to spend their nights at high end night clubs. The site needed to give its users information about what venues the promotion company is working on which nights as well as event information and images of flyers. A gallery with images of previous parties was requested by the client, so that the users can see all the fun that is to be had at one of their events and a contact form was needed as well as contact information so that users visiting the site can contact the client about reservation, guest lists, or bottle service.
Objective or Challenge
The website needed to have an appealing design to its target market to attract them and keep their attention to keep browsing through the site. The design needed to be classy and elegant to go along with the high end venues Rockstar Productions promoted. The events page called for dynamic database-driven content so that it could be organized and be updateable by the website’s administrator. Pagination of the events list was needed as well so that the page didn’t get too long to display all the entries. The Gallery page also needed to be dynamic and updateable by the administrator and made easy, so the users of the website could come and see images from a recent event the company promoted.
Solution
To accomplish the classy and elegant look for the web site, I did some research on some styles and designs other promotional companies and premier night clubs were implementing. For the logo, I decided to incorporate various colors and simulate light in motion to have similarities to the night life scene.
The events page uses PHP and MYSQL to a list of events from the database organizing them in order by date with the newest events displayed first. The page also allows for the list to be filtered by location and pagination is done via javascript and jQuery. Clicking on an event from the list brings up the event details page where more information can be seen along with a flyer image that can be seen at a larger size by clicking the image to bring up a jQuery Fancybox.
In order for the Site Administrator to manage this information, I created a custom Content Management System from scratch. The CMS sits behind a login that allows the Admin to add new events and locations, as well as edit or delete existing ones. On the 'new event' and 'edit event' pages, I created a user-friendly interface to make it easier on the Administrator. I use a jQuery Datepicker to not only assure the correct date format is submitted to the database, but to also make it easier for the Admin. I also use a WYSIWYG Rich Text Editor by CKeditor to give the Admin the ability to write in the event descriptions with a set of tools similar to Microsoft Word.