BurningMan.com Makeover!
At 4:20 on 6.24.03 a tectonic plate moved beneath Burning Man HQ.
Welcome to the new and improved Burning Man website! As of 4:20pm, Tuesday June 24th, www.burningman.com has a new look and feel. The playa dust is blowing in cyberspace!ALL THE COOL NEW STUFF
The most dramatic change is the new visual design of pages. The basic navigation of our site remains the same, but we have grouped our sections into easily discernible areas of interest. Usability improvements were made to the Homepage, the Playa and Year-Round Calendars, and the Image Gallery.
The homepage was restructured to include more easily understood information and links. You will see more frequent updates to the home page content, both to provide specific info for this years event, and to help nurture our community off-the-playa and throughout the year. The page is divided into 3 columns:
- Burning Man 2003 Event, related content and announcements
- Latest News, Polls and Tips
- Stay Connected community-created content
In Latest News, Polls, and Tips you"ll find:
- a new Poll to participate in each week
- Latest News reported fresh as it happens
- new Tips which links to useful pages every other week or so
The community-centric Stay Connected section will provide:
- twice-monthly, (more often when possible) features on the Regional Network
- spotlight on interesting e-Playa BBS threads
- freshly featured "Tales from the Playa"
WHY AND HOW WE DID IT
In the summer of 2002 the Burning Man Web Team began planning how to improve our participants" experiences on the site. Though we were nominated for a Webby Award in 2002 in the Community category, we never really felt like we had a site that truly helped create community, the way the Event does.
It is our long-term goal to get more information from participant to participant, and help the community foster itself beyond the Event. We're looking forward towards developing the web site as a more valuable resource for Burning Man participants and non-participants alike.
Our first step in this direction: talk to our people! Our web team's User Experience experts interviewed attendees of the Burning Man 2002 Decompression/Heat the Street Fair in San Francisco about how they use the site, what info they need, and what kinds of improvements we could make.
Armed with that feedback, we decided on some key usability changes and invited graphic designers to submit new page designs. We received submissions from Burners around the world, and went through a lengthy, exciting, and sometimes heated design debate to incorporate the best aspects of everyone"s designs.
GEEK UPDATE
On the tech side, we decided to move burningman.com into the 21st century by employing CSS and XHTML. The new template code validates 100% for XHTML 1.0 Transitional and the design and layout are nearly 100% CSS-driven. The legacy code still needs a little cleaning, and we will be working to fix it all up before the Event. This technical direction will help us to do some really cool things in the future.
COMING SOON
In the next couple of weeks look out for a few other enhancements including improved navigation for the Tales from the Playa section, Playa Artifacts database, and a new BBS interface including a moderated Lyceum environment for discussions on topics of interest to a wider variety of individuals.
OOOPS, I FOUND A BOO BOO OR 404 FILE NOT FOUND!
We worked our tails off, but as with any site launch, bugs happen. Your assistance with finding and reporting these issues would be greatly appreciated. If you find a bug, see a weird error message, or get a 404/File not found page, please let us know by sending an email to:
website(at)burningman(dot)com
We're most interested in problems that are related to the following: text display, image display, broken links, script functionality, consistent alignment of large images, navigation. When submitting bugs, it would be most useful for us if you include the following information:
1) Your platform/OS: (OSX, Win2K, Linux flavor, etc.)
2) Your browser name: (IE, Netscape, Safari, Opera)
3) Your browser version: (4.25, 6.0, etc.)
4) Your bandwidth: (dialup speed, DSL, T1, etc.)
5) Describe the problem:
6) Expected behavior/appearance:
7) URL/page(s) affected:
8) Other useful info for reproducing the problem: (optional)
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOUS
Along this journey MANY people have contributed to this effort. We'd like to specifically thank some heavy hitters:
Graphic design and layout: Jennifer Alexander, Shell Arkell, Jason Chinn, Britton Holland, Ole Kristensen, Dave Marr, Haunani Pao, Erik Waterman
Template design and coding: Tom 'Spanky' Kapanka, Haunani Pao, Britton Holland
User Research: Haunani 'Web Goddess' Pao, Nicole "Technopatra" Maron, Dan 'Monkeyboy' Kalafus
Content: Marian Goodell, Andie 'ActionGrl' Grace
SysAdmin: Rob 'Ra' Miller, Tom 'Spanky' Kapanka, Evren "Edub" Cakir, and the fine folks at In-House Ticketing
Photo Editor: Heather 'CameraGirl' Gallagher
Coordination, organization, inspiration: Matthew "GG" Beckwith (design organization), Beth Klem (Q/A), and the entire Burning Man Web Team for their enthusiasm, follow-through and patience in this process.
Piloting the Ship: Maid Marian "Jack Rabbit" Goodell
The Pilot would like to thank Helmspersons responsible for gauging weather conditions, reporting errors in compass reading, interpretation of complicated and precise industry language and user research, coordination of social lubricants, ongoing inspiration and tireless cheerleading: Technopatra, Web Goddess, Dave Marr, Spanky, Ra, ActionGrl, CameraGirl and Britton.
We hope you are as excited as we are about this design. Hip Hip Hooray!
With love, pixels and 010101010s-
The Burning Man Web Team, 2003