Lakedance International Film Festival Website

Lakedance.com was built to service our International Film Festival’s needs, and it underwent many design and structural changes along the way.  Each event (annual) carried a completely new structure and design, which is what made a CMS like Drupal become a necessity.  I made the decision to go with a database backend PHP frontend as it would save a ton of time during site redesigns in the off-season and to add all of the features we would need over the year such as ticket sales, program information, and sponsor logo and advertising inclusion.

In the final design, as you now see on the website, I finally arrived at what seems like a satisfying concept:  Primarily created for audiences to get basic information about events and films, and to purchase tickets, but also including advertising for sponsors, eye-catching design, and some special logins and directories for groups like judges and filmmakers.  In particular, I am proud of the design and layout as it features almost completely designed from scratch PHP templates and CSS files.  I tried to take this website to some extremes, with the large image slideshow (courtesy Views Slideshow), and the transparency with a full image background.  I was going for a certain amount of very classic black-and-white elegance with generous spacing, which should allow the stills to stand out with their color.  Also new for the last design was the introduction of video embedding of trailers from youtube.com and Vimeo.

http://lakedance.com
First built: 2007
Built for: Lakedance International Film Festival
Backend: Drupal/MySQL
Design: CSS from scratch by me.
Features: E-commerce, Dynamic Design, Photography, Video Streaming, User-Logins, Special Login Directories, Advertising.