Inside the Fold

A project request came in recently for a mini-site about two new books, Backyard Bird Songs: Eastern Birds & Western Birds.

I was just finishing up a blog site for R.E.M. and I printed out the new project request from BaseCamp and noted the due date…First week of April.

I began flipping through the pages of the request and began to realize there were about 20+ pages to build for this “mini-site.” Definition of mini-site=unknown to me anymore.

After brief pause I scheduled a meeting with the project manager to discuss the request so I could get started.

It was clear to me the idea was great as is the content but that their is a disconnect between the idea, the design, and the production necessary to make it take “flight”. As a front end web-designer I have a lot to keep up on, the new standards, Flash, CSS, browser rendering issues…and oh yeah design and everything that encompasses.

In this section I am going to discuss the research I conducted to get started on the Backyard Birdsongs Mini-site.

It was obvious after meeting with the client that there was a lot of information and some basic necessities to a site that needed to be spelled out.

Navigation:

1. Home
2. Western birds (9)
3. Eastern birds(10)
4. About the author
5. More Bird Songs
6. Contact us.

Home
Introduction by the author.
Marketing for the two titles.

Bird Pages

1. Western Birds/Eastern Birds (19 total)
2. Each bird would have it’s own page. Each page would contain the following:
3. Illustration of the bird and its habitat.
4. Text from the book.
5. Up to 8 mp3 files of bird songs.
6. Descriptions of each audio file.
7. Marketing for the books.