Case study: Hightower Lowdown.
When I first met the co-editor of The Hightower Lowdown, Phillip Frazer, in the spring of 2005, he was just looking for someone to redesign his website. I was thrilled to even be in the running for the gig, having been a fan of Hightower and his populist, activist message for years.
The Lowdown has been published monthly in print since 1999, and has a robust subscriber base that exceeds 100,000. What’s most notable about that base, though, is the fact that they’re incredibly active people. And active people need tools!
I sat with Phillip for several hours explaining the phenomenon of Internet organizing and how it’s changing the face of media — websites aren’t just info repositories anymore, they’re hubs of activism! Provide your people with the tools, and they will do the work. Let them interact with the site, with you, with Hightower, with each other… that was my overall recommendation.
Being a dive-in-head-first kinda guy, Phillip agreed and hired me to implement this vision of a hub for Hightower activism on the web. I, in turn, hired the folks at CivicActions to help me implement the new site that would be built with the Drupal content management system.
I chose Drupal for a variety of reasons, and it’s definitely not the easiest content management system to work with. The fact that it’s open-source (which matches up nicely with the Hightower core belief in the Common Good), and has such a strong development community… plus it came recommended from some great tech people in my community. Not for the faint of heart, though.
We also took on the redesign and deployment of JimHightower.com, which is where Hightower’s audio commentaries are stored, and where he sells his books and announces his appearances. So, that design had to have some similarties in branding, but still be distinct. (Hey, you can get those commentaries as a podcast now!)
It took us about four months to launch JimHightower.com, and then another five to launch the Lowdown. The Lowdown was a lot more complicated than we had originally expected, due to syncing issues with the existing subscriptions database managed by a third party vendor. Drupal previously had no way to handle all that, so we had to make a way to do it. Just one of the many hurdles we managed to jump; with a great team, though, we had enough brainpower to get through.
We’re now working on finalizing some of the community empowerment tools, like having our subscribers be able to organize their own Lowdown events and actions. All-in-all, this is probably the most robust development of a site that I’ve ever worked on, and I can’t wait to see what we come up with next.
