Tell us about yourself.

Tony Chester: I own and operate a small web design firm called OnWired, based near Raleigh, NC.

Tell us about the StarQuest Dance International website.

Tony Chester: Running one of the country’s largest and most successful dance competition companies is no small task, and neither was designing their new website. StarQuest Dance contacted us to update their web presence (which hadn’t been touched since 1994).

We worked closely with their marketing team to create a site that conveyed the professionalism and experience of the company to its older participants (50+) but that was whimsical enough to appeal to its youngest ones (4 and under!). We also had the opportunity to draw from 14 years of rich media in the form of videos and professional photography.

It was a challenging project that went through multiple revisions, but we’re happy with the end result: an attractive, standards–compliant site (unusual in the dance industry).

Why ExpressionEngine?

Tony Chester: We needed a CMS that would give us the flexibility to manage all portions of the site — Steve Wappel, the owner, wanted to be able to give various departments control over their respective pages to ensure timely content. Also, we were attracted to ExpressionEngine’s built–in ability to give posts starting and ending dates, which is crucial for keeping on top of time-sensitive events. Eventually we plan to integrate the e-commerce option, since StarQuest sells videos, t–shirts, etc.

And with the rich support for custom fields, we were even able to integrate management of YouTube clips for the front page: all an editor has to do is upload a video to YouTube and enter the 9–digit code unique to each clip found in the URL.  Then ExpressionEngine places it on the front page and automatically archives the previous one on the ‘Media’ page. The custom fields comes in handy, too, when the company needs to manage the information for dozens upon dozens of competition schedules and venues…

Steve and the marketing team were absolutely blown away at how easy it is to manage all of it — they’d gotten used editing all the HTML by hand in MS Word.  Needless to say, this is something of an improvement.

What add–ons did you use?

Tony Chester: The best and most important aspect of our decision to use ExpressionEngine was the Photo Gallery module: we’re big fans of SlideshowPro, and we use the module to power it. So all StarQuest employees need to do is upload photos via the gallery module and they are automatically incorporated into the front page’s random Flash gallery.

This was important too because StarQuest wanted to showcase its years of photo content (which they do to great effect in their print brochures), but we didn’t want to clutter the web design with dozens of photos and were able to reach a compromise — the viewer still sees the action, the design is consistent and they can add the pictures to the Flash movie themselves. I daresay no other CMS we’ve worked with could have made this work as smoothly as it does.

You mentioned that one of the main goals was to give various departments the power to update content. How was ExpressionEngine received by the content editors, and what training did you undertake to help them?

Tony Chester: So far the content editors love it, especially the customized WYSIWYG buttons we introduced to their custom fields. It’s obvious which button makes the text purple!  Overall we only spent about two hours training two of their staff, who in turn were able to instruct the rest.  We’ve received a handful of calls in the first two months of launch, asking about how to update a certain portion here or there. Otherwise, it’s been smooth-sailing.