Creative Net Speakers’ Agency
Creative Net Speakers’ Agency facilitate author and illustrator participation in schools, libraries, conferences and festivals. For something completely different, they provide their service for free.
Connecting you to inspirational and talented authors & illustrators.
Testimonial:
Thanks, Min, for a great site. It’s so much fresher than my previous site. I love the ease with which viewers can navigate the site. The design and functionality are top notch.
-- Paul CollinsOwner of Creative Net Speakers' Agency
Web project details:
After the successful launch of Paul Collins’ author website, Paul was keen for me to redesign and come up with a new logo for one of his businesses, Creative Net Speakers’ Agency. The old website listed over 170 creatives that he represented, but it was dated and had no solid identity. There was no way to filter through creatives other than by state, and their email addresses, being the primary contact method, attracted a lot of spam.
I don’t take on branding jobs very often, but coming up with something for Creative Net was key before we could embark upon the task of a website redesign. As Creative Net represents creatives from many fields; authors, illustrators, public speakers, musicians, and more, it made sense to develop something with people and utilise some nice, bright colours to indicate the variety of specialities.
Once the logo was finalised, the website redesign could begin. Paul wanted to make sure it would be easy for librarians to read, use, and find what they were after. With the branding newly completed, the colour scheme was ready to go; nice, bright colours, with an emphasis on large photos and readability.
To address the challenge of making a very useful advanced search or filtration system, after some research I tracked down a series of integrations to build a filter on the right of the creative listings page that dynamically updates results whenever an option is selected.
A custom post type was created to house the Creative type, which contains loads of custom fields (Advanced Custom Fields was used to achieve this) and an image cropper to ensure that feature images are created at a consistent aspect ratio. The formatting is all taken care of from the style sheet, so the client can input all the data as text (or in the case of the filter options, checkboxes), and it’s prettied up with CSS, creating a more consistent look as the client doesn’t have to remember how they made something look a certain way each time.
To cater to audiences who were familiar with the old site’s way of finding available creatives, an additional page was created that automatically lists all creatives separated by home state.
Paul also wanted a guest author blog, which was developed using WordPress’ standard blogging capabilities with a few Advanced Custom Field fields created to build up a more meta-rich author box, which also links back to their creative profile (if they are represented by CNSA) and updates with their author name in the relevant places.
Lastly Paul wanted to be able to collect all the information he needed to provide quotes through a series of forms. Each individual creative page contains two forms; one for the user to enquire about booking the creative, and another for the user to submit a testimonial about the creative. There is also a generic booking enquiry form, a generic testimonials form, and an even more generic contact form. Each form submits not only the information filled out by the user, but provides a link to quickly and easily tell Paul which page the form was submitted from, plus auto-fills information when a form has been submitted from a specific creative’s page.
There is a lot of really funky technology put together to make this site the useful tool it now is, and I love the way the bright colours and strong fonts work together with the large photos.