Uriel Orlow is an artist known for his modular multi-media installations, comprising video, photography, sound, text, drawing and prints. His work is exhibited internationally and is represented in private and public collections.
Project outline
Uriel approached me to redesign and rebuild his existing static website. From the start, the brief was as much about content and structuring information as it was about refreshing the visual design.
Previous website - home page
Previous website - publications page
Uriel’s site was an online archive of his artistic output since 2001. It detailed his own works in various media, as well as publications, reviews, exhibition information and his biography. Uriel had authored and interlinked a large number of individual HTML pages himself, but updating the site was becoming increasingly inefficient as the volume of material and data increased.
Information architecture
Post-it notes: lots of them.
At a series of planning meetings Uriel and I began to piece together a new site structure. It was important to consider early on how different types of content would fit together in a content management system, and to identify the taxonomies we would use (tags, categories, people, places) to organise Uriel’s archive.
Online curation
I decided that WordPress was the right platform for the site: it’s flexible, extendable, well-supported, and pretty much future-proof. Having convinced Uriel of its benefits, I immediately installed WordPress on his server to enable him to play around with the software, to explore its functionality and scope.
We both realised from the start that it would be vital for Uriel to take creative and technical ownership of the site; when I ultimately handed it over to him it had to be his website, that he could continue to expand and evolve over time.
Rich features
Uriel and I created a number of different template types to accommodate and showcase his content. These included:
- a dynamic home page with a carousel of featured work manually organised by Uriel
- a list of exhibitions with special date fields and pagination
- ‘big’ project pages with outline, thumbnail gallery and related works
- pages for single works, publications or events with contextual links to related content
- a CV page detailing works and exhibitions at a glance
- 3 or 4 different kinds of image gallery to present still images and video
Navigation
A key element of our approach to the project was the idea of a dynamic matrix of content types, linked together to facilitate easy navigation. The volume of content could have resulted in information silos with long breadcrumbs and too-deep hierarchies. Instead, the navigation is flattened, and work formerly buried in the old site is now brought to the surface and given fresh relevance. On each page is a deep footer section that links both internally and externally, constantly offering new ways to access the content.
