Yellow Earth Theatre - New website launch

Saturday, 01 November, 2008

Yellow Earth Theatre is a London based British East Asian touring theatre company, revenue funded by Arts Council England. It was established in 1995 by five British East Asian performers, with a view to raising the profile and standing of British East Asian theatre.

I've just completed work on and launched their second and latest website. Well, as completed as websites will be nowadays since they are best kept continually updated, nurtured and occasionally pruned!

The new site is at : YellowEarth.org

I first came across Yellow Earth more than 10 years ago when researching the British Chinese culture for my Graphic Design degree.

After starting Kibook back in 1999, I contacted them and soon after, Yellow Earth became one of our first clients, whereupon we created their first website.

Needless to say, our decade long working relationship and the cultural nature of their work resonating personally to me has been a highlight of my working life so far.

Knowing and understanding Yellow Earth's work for such a long time helped tremendously in the process of designing the look and feel of the new site.

But there were also lots of underlying modern requirements such as meeting accessibility guidelines, optimising the code for search engines and building a solid back end for all the new content.

I worked solely on the new site and after designing and building templates, implemented the Expression Engine content management system. This enabled me to build the dynamics of the site as I wanted, allowing for features such as a news weblog to sit alongside information for different sections of the site and production pages that incorporated photo thumbnails, galleries and videos.

Utilising a database also allowed lots of cross linking and presentation of content which ultimately allows us to bring the information that visitors want to see first, up front without compromising it's "place" in the deeper levels of the information architecture.

This new version of the Yellow Earth Theatre website is alot more colourful than its predecessor, so it does allow a little colour coding for general areas of the site, but also conveys the visuals of some of the richness developed in Yellow Earth's productions.

Using the landscape scenery also creates a visual relationship with the similarly designed promotional cd-rom which I also developed for them a few years ago.

I'm really happy about how the Yellow Earth site turned out, so if you have a moment, please check it out!

The new site is at : YellowEarth.org

This entry posted in : Design & Art Direction. Made By Mark. East Asian Culture.

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British Chinese, Digital Design Consultant. Web Geek, Technologist, Blogger and Careful Entrepreneur. Budding Photo Journalist.

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