Show-ee

http://www.smithsrow.org/

Bury St Edmunds Art Gallery in Suffolk, UK has re-launched as Smiths Row with a new identity and website designed by Silk Pearce, a multi-disciplinary design company based in Colchester, UK. The website design needed to showcase the art and craft on display at the gallery, and provide clear details on the events at Smiths Row. The target audience for the site ranges from art students to professional artists and craft makers. The website needed to be as usable as possible but also present the identity in a way that is consistent to its use in printed material.

The organisation main activity is its exhibitions and events. ExpressionEngine is really good at managing these as new entries can have a specific start and expiry date and time applied in the control panel. This can be easily displayed on the webpage as required. This has made it very easy for the staff at Smiths Row to more effectively promote the organisations events. It was also quite simple to use the entries to dynamically create a hidden field for the registration form containing details for each event.

The calendar feature in ExpressionEngine is quite straightforward to make use of and style to fit seamlessly with the website design. Incorporating the calendar on dynamically created pages was not straight forward, however. But the ExpressionEngine forums responded quickly with the solution. The ability to relate entries was particularly useful, it makes it possible for the organisation to cross promote events in exhibition entries.

The ability to ‘offset’ a list of entries makes it easy to create an archive page that can display very entry except a specified number. It’s a simple but very effective technique! An arts organisation really values the feedback it receives from visitors and so adding a comments form to the exhibition page seemed a great way to encourage this type of interactivity.

The ‘File’ extension by Mark Huot is an effective way of allowing site administers to upload any kind of file to the website including images and PDFs. It was also used to manage images for slideshows on the site. ‘LG TinyMCE’ extension was also used to provide WYSIWYG typographic controls for the entries.

Other Add-ons

File, LG TinyMCE, Sitename

Company: Silk Pearce

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