An Introduction to the Blog and this Site
Posted on Fri, 28 Nov 2008
Hi everyone, my name is Andrew Waters and I'm the web manager here at Northern Lights Film Festival.
As you are hopefully aware by now, the festival has gone international and I'd like to take 5 minutes to talk about what that means relative to my role with NLFF.
One of the most important things for this years festival was to bring the personality of the team out into the web and have an open platform that we could all voice from. As well as being beneficial for our own sanity, we have always tried to stay away form the 'corporate mentality'. To do this, we will all be trying to squeeze a few minutes here and there to sit down and talk our online audience through what is happening here at NLFF.
Being personable is our strongest asset - it is in many ways what Northern Lights is based on. And we think the fans of the films are exactly the same. It is where we share part of our common ground and the reason that year after year the Northern Lights team have worked their fingers so hard you can start to see bone. I sincerely hope that our efforts are well received and you take some time to have a good look through the site and maybe find a few new things you've never seen (or heard) before.
We have this blog for the festival, our news feed to keep up to date with the latest developments and a brand spanking new Podcast that we will be serving up daily videos from the festival. It's a great year for NLFF and our audience.
Online communication has been an essential part of every business for at least the last 5 years. As developers keep on developing amazing online applications (I'm looking at you, Twitter) and introductions of new technologies such as cloud computing and social network API's (the bits that let you write websites into Social Networks) there are so many paths you can follow it can be far too easy to overstretch yourself by making a list of too many things to update at once.
So with this in mind we started looking at redeveloping the Northern Lights site by stripping everything back to its bare components and starting from fresh with a plan for features that we would introduce gradually and introduce parts of the site that were practical and relevant to this years mission.
By far the biggest message we have been trying to communicate is the fact that our film mission is now International. And if I put my geek hat on, I think I can show that this has been successfully communicated through this very site. Years of research into "User Design" have led to psychologists suggesting best practice for laying out a site based on what the eye gets drawn to. One very handy little tool we have been using to monitor the impact of design changes here has been a free online utility called Feng-Gui (displayed on the left).
Sure, it is nice to look at (in my opinion) but it also serves a very practical purpose. You can see where eyes are drawn into - in this case on the home page. You can see a great deal of attention on our key message not just once, but twice! (in the main body and the header).
Little tools like this are incredible for assessing effectiveness of campaigns and potential designs as you can see.
The festival would be nothing without its team and I'd like to extend my thanks to them for having me on board this year and wish them all the best of luck during the festival. Most of all though, thank you for making the festival what it is.
It's cheesy, I know, but it would be nothing without you all! I hope you enjoy the films and also all of the content we're getting online for you this year and will no doubt be back on the blog before the week is up!
UPDATE - since I wrote this yesterday I thought we'd change the homepage slightly to give the next event section more attention. Here is a similar map as above, but you'll see that now the eye focuses on the next event a lot sooner than before. Great for using this site to see what is on next!
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