The Charlotte Art League’s redesigned website recently went live, the result of nearly four months of effort by an all-volunteer team. As the committee’s chairperson, I managed the project from concept through launch and handled the majority of the design and development work.

Challenges and Requirements

Building a website for a non-profit like the Charlotte Art League (CAL) presents a different set of challenges than the ones you typically find in the  for-profit world. Volunteer-based staff, low or no budget, and outdated technology require patience and diplomatic skills to successfully bring a web project from dream to reality. An additional factor that requires a different mindset is that the central goal of the organization may not necessarily be simply to sell more widgets.

In the Art League’s case, a number of different committees and initiatives exist that require attention. Obviously, member artists want to sell more art, but activities like community outreach, art education, and studio rentals are all fundamental to the mission as well. The website has to simultaneously address the needs each of these various stakeholders, while remaining true to the organization’s overall mission of enriching the community through the arts.

WordPress to the Rescue

The new site is built in WordPress, using a custom theme I developed for this project. We opted to use WordPress not only because of its power, search engine friendliness, and design flexibility, but also to take advantage of its capabilities as a multi-author content management system — it’s definitely not just for blogs anymore! WordPress’s CMS capabilities were especially attractive because updating the old CAL site was an inefficient, time consuming process. While content could be sourced by any number of sources within CAL, content destined for the website had to be first sent to the web administrator, who then made updates manually. This system created a workflow bottleneck that resulted in an irregular posting schedule, with the site frequently being months out of date.

With the WordPress CMS, authors are now able to log in under their own unique usernames and edit their own content. The level of access can be controlled, so that non-technical users don’t accidentally modify files that affect the site’s operation. Basic word processing functions are provided using a familiar interface, and WordPress saves the revision history of documents — no one has to fear losing or ruining their data.

Keeping It Fresh

Another advantage of WordPress is that the post management functionality that powers WordPress blogs could be adapted to manage CAL’s home page, keeping it constantly up to date with content featuring current events at the gallery. We decided to keep commenting turned on. Even though the site isn’t technically a blog, hosting some stimulating discussion about art is a great way to build community and ongoing engagement with the organization. And thanks to a little bit of PHP tweaking and some help from plugins, the current “post” that constitutes the home page features the “Happening Now at CAL” banner. Archived versions of the post won’t display the banner, adding a subtle cue to distinguish between current and past events.

The Way Forward

Now that the initial phase of the release is complete, work has already begun on the next round of enhancements, including an online gallery offering works for sale as well as individual pages for member artists to display and sell their work.

DISCLOSURE: Since completing the work on the Charlotte Art League (CAL) redesign, I have been offered and accepted a spot on CAL’s Board of Directors, completing the term of a board member who had resigned.

I was recently updating my profile on Twellow, and wanted to add “Creativity” as a category so that I could follow what was being said on Twitter about that topic. Since I am interested in creativity as a primary subject, I naturally searched for that topic to add to my profile.  Unfortunately, “creativity” was not one of the available options. However, Twellow provides a link where you can contact them to recommend a new category, so I sent them an email requesting that it be added.

A couple days later, I received a response from Twellow. They had added “Creativity” as a sub-category of “Arts.” Which wasn’t quite what I was expecting. My thinking when requesting the new category was that creativity could be a broad catch-all topic – there were plenty of categories already on Twellow for individual creative fields and pursuits (art, music, design, etc.), but there was no home for the process of creativity itself.

If it had been up to me, I would have placed it at or near the top level in the taxonomy. In my opinion, creativity is not just a thing that artists do – it’s for anyone, in any field, who seeks to extend their options by applying a deliberate process of lateral thinking, idea generation, and so forth. I understand that Twellow probably has guidelines for how they classify categories, and that creativity may not have rated a top level under their system. Ultimately, what this illustrates is that a topic that is of the utmost importance to how one person organizes their worldwiew might be nothing more than a niche to another.

Where would you place Creativity if you were developing a classification system similar to Twellow’s?

Image: More Spatter and Splatter, by love not fear on Flickr.