Surf Reality. Merely releasing the words from your brain creates an aura of performance, music, art and comedy like absolutely no other on the planet. Surf was a small cutting-edge (well, bleeding-edge) theater that lived on Allen Street in the Lower East Side from 1993 – 2003. The theater itself went the way of gentrification, but owner Robert Prichard refuses to let Surf die.

He's now running a production company that puts on the immensely insane and bizarrely beautiful shows once seen at the theater, and he came to me in search of a website that might be able to help spread the word about these shows — Surf Burlesque, the ongoing Faceboyz Open Mike, the brand-new Radical Vaudeville, and more. How could I resist?

One of the things I like to do with my clients is to teach them something. I'm not really content just to build a site and then let it loose into the world blindly. Here was a perfect opportunity to take an artist and businessman, and turn him into his own web guy, too.

I chose WordPress to be the content management system for the site, because it's easy to design for, easy to install and maintain, but most importantly, it's easy for regular folks to update their sites by themselves! Not only does this remove me as the middleperson for content, but it makes clients like Rob feel like they're in control of their own destinies.

We worked for about two weeks on the design of the site, which had some tricky elements to it. First, I wanted to update the Surf logo (above) to have some depth and texture. Second, we wanted to incorporate pieces of the theater's history into the visuals, so: (a) the header graphic is comprised completely of elements from the theater, including flyers, art that was stationed there, and more; (b) the letters in the main navigation are all cutout from a picture I took of the old front door of the theater, which is completely covered in bumper stickers. (You can see it on this page.)

But we wanted folks to have an easy time getting around the site, and finding out what they needed to know– including making the press kit available for potential sponsors and venues. We opted for radical colors and graphics, but kept the layout and info design as straightforward as possible.

We launched about four weeks after starting it, and I provided both in-person trainings for Rob, and a printable manual for reference later. He's been merrily updating the site since March '06, and his community is thrilled to have his presence back online.