Through BMC's strategic and technical partnership with R&B Communications, Banner Mountain Creative was presented with an interesting challenge the week of Thanksgiving 2010. R&B's client, the California State Summer School for the Arts had spent several months working with a graphic designer in LA to create an entirely new web site.
As the design and approval process took longer than hoped, CSSSA was about to send out hundreds of thousands of pieces of snail mail, asking high school students from around the state to apply for admission to the 25th anniversary session of CSSSA.
The California State Summer School for the Arts features the top artistic talent in the country teaching month long sessions to the best and brightest high school students in Music, Dance, Theater, Film Making, Visual Arts, Creative Writing and Animation.
The original design files BMC received included no technical specification, were an arbitrary size and included little of the final content that was to go into the site. The site map called for approximately 61 individual web pages, dozens of PDFs, hero graphics for each page, custom designed JavaScript navigation, the embedding of rich media from CSSSA's YouTube channel, links to social media on each page as well as "skip to" anchors on each page. In addition there were photographic galleries for each discipline taught for each week of the 2010 session. This amounted to over 3500 high resolution JPEGS that had to be oriented and sized for display on the web.
This site screamed of needing custom engineering, but the challenge was: Banner Mountain Creative received the finalized content 9 days before the deadline for the site to go live. Utilizing the entire team at BMC and with the help of R&B Communications, we were able to complete the project on-time and on budget - even over the Thanksgiving Holiday.
Since the site went live, Banner Mountain Creative has managed the maintenance of the site with numerous additions and changes. Due to the fact that the site was created using a content managment system, updates, upgrades and feature changes are almost instantaneous.
