About 10 years ago we did a website for a nationally known dance studio that opened a branch here in Tampa. We gave the client the option of a Flash website, one that would allow us to use some animation and music to convey the movement and mood of a ballroom dance studio. The other option was a fairly new method of building a site, a fairly new platform (CMS) that we were playing with at the time, WordPress. You see, Flash was incredibly capable for building beautiful dynamic websites, but it was very difficult for our clients to update things such as events and schedules (something a dance studio would need often). The client chose to go with the Flash site. On the up side we did a beautiful site. On the down side it wasn’t long before they needed weekly and sometimes daily updates to the site. Now there were ways to get Flash sites updated by having Flash pull from a text file (xml) but it still had to be handled by us.
This was a turning point for us, we were smart enough (and lucky!) to see what the future held. With SEO turning away from keywords and metadata to an algorithm that relied on frequent and relevant content, and the constant problems with the monster that Flash had become, we decided to jump headfirst into developing WordPress websites.
So why are we telling you this? Well, one of the principals of this dance studio was a world champion dancer named Luca Baricchi. He remembered the site and everything we went through to get it just right. Jumping ahead to the present Luca was developing a unique approach to the techniques, training and educational methods of classical dance, and was establishing a new institute. Luca hadn’t been to the USA in some time but we were honored when he flew in from Italy, just to meet with us. He wanted the fluid and graceful feel of the Flash website but needed the infrastructure of WordPress to allow him to grow as his institute did. We always missed the freedom of design and animation that Flash served. So we’ve been sharpening our skills to marry that freedom and functionality into one site platform. We also designed a logo to match the feel of what Luca’s techniques and spatial 3 -dimensional movement.. Be sure to have a look at the results.
