Wordpress Archives - Bad Feather

Launch: Fraenkel Gallery Website

Nearly a year in the works, we’re pretty darn proud to be the makers of the new Fraenkel Gallery website. Established in 1979, Fraenkel Gallery is a San Francisco photography gallery that features work by artists spanning from early masters to present day, including Lee Friedlander, Walker Evans, Edward Weston, Diane Arbus, Hiroshi Sugimoto and many more. The gallery has also published an extensive collection of books, including artist monographs and exhibition catalogs.

In the development of this heavily customized WordPress-driven website, we explored and pushed the database capabilities to the max in order to dynamically display the gallery’s extensive collection of artist works, exhibitions and publications. FraenkelGallery.com is intended to serve as a growing archive for the gallery as well as a resource for the history of photography and its relation to other arts.

Oh, and it’s responsive! Over the past year, Bad Feather has adapted its design practices to develop web layouts that adapt and respond to the ever-increasing range of device sizes and aspect ratios. The website looks beautiful on your smart phone, tablet or desktop web browser.

Operation Gastronomia: We’re Hungry

Here at Bad Feather we finally took pause from our regular workload, much of which involves designing and building other peoples’ websites (resisting urge to make O.P.P. joke… we recently tallied 30! custom WordPress sites) to create one of our own: A long discussed, but never prioritized project – Heather’s food blog.

This week we proudly launched OperationGastronomia.com. Let’s call this a beta version, as there are of course many plans for added plugins and design embellishments, but Heather is cooking up a storm as usual and it was time to put her content out into the world.

So now you know what we’re eating. Check it out, and follow Heather’s twitter stream @opgastronomia for more tasty bits. And most important of all, buon appetito!

Bad Feather Gets Freaky

Last week we proudly launched FreakonomicsRadio.com. Freakonomics Radio, produced in partnership with American Public Media’s Marketplace and WNYC, is a project from the authors of the best selling Freakonomics books that includes a weekly podcast, regular segments on Marketplace, and one-hour specials to be broadcast on public-radio stations across the country. Bad Feather designed and developed the website as a place for listers to experience this content as well as a wealth of web extras, including additional audio and articles.

It was an exciting challenge for us to bring a fresh look to this new piece of the well-known Freakonomics empire. In addition to the website design, we also had an opportunity to further develop the branding specific to Freakonomics Radio through the design of a web ad campaign and promotional graphics for the iTunes store.

And if that’s not enough for you, Bad Feather designed illustrated charts and this fancy infographic to accompany the inaugural content at the launch of the website. This included a new podcast, marketplace segment and a web extra, all exploring the hidden side of major league baseball stats.

During our involvement in the project we listened to all the podcasts (there’s plenty of great archival content to be consumed on the site) and can definitely count ourselves among the many fans. Check out FreakonomicsRadio.com for yourself, and if you like what you hear, subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and check back for more.

What Does Web Design Have to Do with Farming?

Over the past year we’ve been working on a web-based project for a man who doesn’t have a personal email address and never uses the internet: our friend and farmer, Ray Bradley. Since leaving his career as a chef for farming more than 10 years ago, Ray has been profiled by everyone from enthusiastic bloggers to the New York Times (it’s frequently mentioned that he’s a childhood friend and former sous chef of David Bouley). But even with great press and a longtime, loyal community of supporters, farming is a tough gig. Ray can use all the help he can get to build his customer base and sell all the delicious produce and products he raises and then treks from New Paltz to NYC twice a week.

We began collaborating almost a year ago with Ray’s girlfriend, Iris Kimberg (who happens to be a bit of a marketing maven), to promote Bradley Farm. Starting with a coming soon site and some good old mailing list sign-up sheets at the market, we collected emails addresses and began sending a weekly newsletter. Over the past 6 months the audience has grown to nearly 500 green market customers who are receiving notice of what’s coming to market and the occasional recipe, photo, or story from the farm. Ray is delighted with the positive response to the emails and when people show up at the farm stand telling him how much they were looking forward to those strawberries or how much they loved the photos of the chicken coop, it makes everyone feel more connected.

Last month we launched RayBradleyFarm.com, a WordPress site with info about Bradley Farm and a blog that hosts both news and press. The annual farm festival is coming up and we’re experimenting with selling tickets and fundraiser raffles online and will soon be taking pre-orders for Bradley Farm pork. All of our marketing efforts have been a work in progress and the website and its content will continue to evolve as the farm and its offerings also evolve with each season. We’ve talked about setting Ray up with a computer he can check emails on from the farm, and although he’s interested, he’s in no hurry to make that leap. In the meantime, he relays the weeks’ bounty to Iris who emails it to his customers.

This was a great summer for Bradley Farm’s famous heirloom tomatoes, so we can’t take too much credit for bringing people back week after week, but we do feel a bit proud when we show up at a crowded market stall each Saturday. it’s been a rewarding experience for us to utilize new media tools to help educate people about their food and the man who works to grow it. For more info, visit RayBradleyFarm.com.

Young Visionaries

Do you know someone with an idea for a project that works toward a vision of change? The International Women’s Health Coalition recently launched their 2010 Young Visionaries Campaign:

At the International Women’s Health Coalition, we are inspired by the activism of young people and their visions for the future of sexual rights and reproductive health.Through our Young Visionaries contest, we aim to celebrate, acknowledge, and support the exceptional and ongoing work of young people.

Our Young Visionaries contest encourages youth to share their visions for young people and the future. Until March 25, 2010 youth between the ages of 18 and 30 can share their visions for a just and healthy life, and get a chance to win a $1000 grant from the International Women’s Health Coalition to fund a project that works toward this vision.

We recently completed a project, in collaboration with Dtek, to design a microsite for the Young Visionaries contest. Built on top of the WordPress platform already being utilized for IWHC’s Akimbo blog, the site allows users to register, nominate a contestant and vote to support their favorite nominees. You can read a more detailed write-up of the site development and WordPress plugins we utilized, courtesy of Andy, over on the Dtek blog.

Check it out and show your support for the visionaries from around the world.

The Bad Feather WordPress Maintenance Spiel

Sweet. You have an awesome, powerful WordPress site that allows you to add and edit content like a crazy web superhero. But as Spidey’s story reminds us, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

WordPress is a complicated machine – a database that organizes, archives and serves up everything you throw at it. Like any other machine, it requires regular attention to make sure it continues to function properly. To continue with the superhero motif, the web has many a super-villain that one must be diligent to thwart; hackers, worms and server crashes, oh my.

In the event of a catastrophe, is your site safe and prepared? Is your data regularly backed up, are your versions up to date and is everything running smoothly? If your site crashed, are you sitting pretty with the knowledge that you can restore the entire site in a few clicks? If so, carry on, soldier. If not, keep reading… Continue reading →

For the Love of Corduroy

A public service announcement for people who like Corduroy fabric:

Bad Feather is pleased to announce the momentous unveiling of the newly redesigned CorduroyClub.com, and perhaps more importantly, the imminent Grand 11|11 Meeting of the Corduroy Appreciation Club!

Below is a screenshot of the Corduroy Appreciation Club’s new home. Please visit the website, and if you have a true appreciation for Corduroy fabric, consider both joining the organization and attending the 11|11 meeting, which promises to be epic.

HAIL THE WALE!

CorduroyClub.com

Bring the Noise

We are psyched to announce a new site we built for 1928 Recordings, a Brooklyn-based record label helmed by Ryan McReynolds. Designed in collaboration with our friend Sohrab from Shadowless Kick, 1928recordings.com features a catalog of the label’s releases, listings for upcoming tour dates, and label news and info, all editable by 1928 Recordings (thanks again, WordPress). The online store was built separately using the new White Label service from Insound.com.

Check it out.

BF_1928

For the WordPress nerds out there who might be curious, we used GigPress for the tour listings, Cleaner Gallery and Shadowbox for the image slideshows, Audio Player for the audio samples, and Viper’s Video Quicktags for the video embeds.

Stefan Rules!

We recently completed StefanRules.com, a portfolio site for our friend and occasional design collaborator Stefan Lawrence. The site, designed by Stefan, is built in WordPress and takes advantage of its built-in gallery functions, albeit with a little tweaking and jQuery magic, to create a pretty cool, custom portfolio theme (if we do say so ourselves).

Here are a few of its snazzy features:

Thumbnails images of featured galleries get pulled into the home page.
Each gallery section has a sliding exhibition of design projects and details, accompanied by a numbered navigation system. For this we used the excellent jQuery plugin jQuery Cycle.
An accordion navigation on the left that expands the work section and subsections. While we’re in the habit of sharing, we chose this plugin to accomplish this.
And, of course, a blog; this is WordPress after all.

Stefan Rules - Home

Emily Heller Photos

EH website

Emily Heller is a friend and photographer who recently relocated from Brooklyn to San Francisco to pursue an MFA (sniff, sniff…). Emily’s work, both commercial and fine art, is food photography and she sure does make tasty pictures. We recently completed a new portfolio site to promote her work and we’re happy to see she’s utilizing the WordPress platform for blogging and regularly adding new images to her portfolios. Check it out for yourself.

We also need to give props to Emily for the photography of the print pieces in our Bad Feather portfolio. Thanks for making our work look so good!

Announcing (drum roll)… the all new PoetryProject.org

Bad Feather is proud to introduce the new identity and website of The Poetry Project.

Located at St. Mark’s Church in NYC, the Poetry Project has been publishing, hosting readings and workshops, and providing resources for writers and readers of contemporary poetry for over 43 years. They needed an updated identity and site that looked beyond their rich history to their future as a vital arts organization.

The new logo is composed of a brush-lettered scrawl projecting in a megaphone shape. The colors are bright and bold, like the character, present currency, and dynamism of the organization itself. We hope the new identity communicates the voice of the Poetry Project:

…The most important thing that we do is present… Without listenership, readership, AUDIENCE, the Project wouldn’t exist for the luminaries to do their thing.

We built the site in WordPress (as code is poetry), allowing the Project to post content on a regular basis in various types, including calendar events, photos, audio, and video from events, historic archives and news. The Poetry Project hosts many events, so a calendar function was a big priority. For this, we used the plugin Event Calendar 3. (Other plugins used, if you’re curious: Contact Form 7, Audio Player, Smart YouTube, WP Super Cache, Cleaner Gallery and a few more. We went plugin crazy on this one).

The site also features a store to sell, among other things, membership to the Poetry Project and subscriptions to their publications. We used Big Cartel for that puppy.

We’re psyched about the results. It’s been a true labor of love. Take a look.