Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Queen of the Bay

In the nooks of time I have available nowadays I was able to put up the site and flyers for Shab's Queen of the Bay Bellydance Competition website. This site is significant for several reasons.

Web Void
The first reason is that there are still niches that exist that have huge voids when it comes to web design, usability, and business models. Bellydance is one of those areas. Although the site is a huge step in the right direction, we still don't have the time and resources (yet) to dedicate to all the areas we can take advantage of. We'll get there though.

Tableless Design
The Queen of the Bay site also marks my first attempt at tableless HTML. That was the intent from the beginning and so it was a lot less painful since I knew what types of design elements do and don't lend themselves to this kind of format. There's big Flash movie integrated into the site, which I wanted to use to make the illustration look as crisp as possible, but for the rest of the page, using div's and styles exclusively in style sheets is becoming less painful.

Event Promotion
The site also represents my first foray into event planning and promotion. Shabnam is a little tornado when it comes to stuff like that, so I'm hoping everything will work out okay. There's a lot of planning, and stress, and timing involved, but hopefully it'll pay off with both the event and the web site.

Bellydancers
Who doesn't like bellydancers? What it comes down to is that this is what the site is about. These ladies train, compete, and teach a style of performance art that has been around for thousand's of years. It's great when you get to see it executed well. If you haven't seen bellydance before you're missing out. Not all dancers are great, but the great ones are a lot of fun to watch. So if you're in the neighborhood on June 17th, make sure you stop by.