Project Highlights :
Georgia Tech has a strong history of students and faculty very involved in the major innovations in the automotive engineering and technology fields. Consequently, every year they celebrate this expertise by throwing an auto show. This auto show is unlike others in that it takes all vehicles, cars, motorcycles, planes, boats whatever,of all eras and in all conditions. If you are proud of your ride then your ride is welcomed. Sterling Skinner, of the Mechanical Engineering department, is the founder and director of the show which is held every spring.
Sterling is something of a frustrated artist. He knew exactly what he wanted for the site, but didn’t have the skills to create it. In this case, we had to pull out of him the vision that he had for what the site and this year’s poster would look like which was somewhat like a guessing game. After coming up with several ideas, he decided on one of our concepts of toy car/real car. It was important to Sterling to show photos of the show with people in them, this was a way that he felt displayed the unique character of the show. People could see that there are all sorts of vehicles and see that a wide variety of people were having a great time up close and personal to some fabulous cars.
Another thing Sterling wanted was a site for the Ga Tech Alums to get involved. This expanded into a vision of a 24/7 virtual auto show that would extend the feel of the auto show between shows. The site that we would create would be a place to build community and keep it going between shows. We were going to add a forum to the regular site but instead decided to create an entire social network site using Ning. The site is called Georgia Tech Gearheads and in the first three days of its existence has 25 members without yet promoting it at all.
The main site although a WordPress site, it has an almost static front page. The blog page in called news and is on the nav bar but is not highlighted. In addition to all of the show information and registration. we were able to include a gallery section with each past year with a Flickr sideshow, a synopsis of the year, the winners and a photo of the tee shirt and the trophy for each year. We also have showcased people from tech who have contribute to the field with a photo and short bio of their accomplishment.
New Tricks Services:
- Website creation: We brought in information from the existing site and supplemented it with other information provided by the client. We created a graphic representation of toy cars that when you highlight a car a real car of that type from the show pops up with real people enjoying the show. The front page is static except for a box at the bottom which highlights the latest posts.
- Graphics Created a new logo and a website header. Created background graphics for the customization of the website and the Gearheads Ning site.
- Copy and Photos: worked with Sterling Skinner who provided past files from previous shows. We rewrote existing copy and add additional copy for the blog and about pages.
- Social Media: Started Twitter and Flickr sites and linked them to the blog site.
