IHOS Music Theatre & Opera, based in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, recently celebrated its 20th anniversary season. Ready for a higher functioning site that really showcased the company’s striking visual style, IHOS sought to feature audio and video tracks, highlighting individual works from their repertoire. IHOS received pro bono branding and site graphic design from Envelope Group (Australia) and chose PerformSites to implement Envelope’s striking designs and create a strong foundation through a WordPress site with newly edited content. Their old site didn’t showcase their most well known works in a way they were happy with — the new site really shines light on the visuals, audio/video, and descriptive text related to these works.

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PerformSites recently launched a unique new web site for the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus, providing innovative solutions to bring this organization’s site into the 21st century. The organization needed a clean, hip and streamlined new look and had recently begun a branding process including a great new logo. Critical business issues that they face include maximizing ticket sales and marketing upcoming shows – both of which were boosted by the new site’s dynamic interface. They also chose PerformSites because they liked the easy-to-use WordPress CMS (content management system). This allows any authorized member of the staff to add, modify and update nearly all sections of the site at any time they choose.

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Lisa Pegher is an American solo percussionist who has been described by the Boston Globe as “forcefully balletic” and by critic Marty Lash of the Door County Advocate as “a gifted passionate artist, with a rock-star aura.” She has been featured in Symphony Magazine as one of the top six performers of her generation and continues to carve a new path for percussion as a solo instrument.

 
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A passionate proponent of new American and Japanese solo piano repertoire, Chie Sato Roden “pushes contemporary music beyond the confines of a restricted genre” (Yuji Numata). She has issued three CDs, the first two featuring the works of contemporary Japanese and American composers. Her most recent, Streetcar Journey, features the magnificent, jazz-inflected score to the 1951 classic “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

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Richard Hollander’s sculptures represent a fusion of visual and acoustic rhythm animated by digital and mechanical control mechanisms. www.articulatedmovement.com

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Felicia Hoshino (www.felishino.com)  is an illustrator and designer in San Francisco. Her focus includes children’s book illustration, editorial illustration assignment, and commissioned portraits.

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Composer and musician John McDowell (www.johnmcdowell.net) has been heard at Lincoln Center, the UN, the Montreal Jazz Festival, and throughout Europe and North America.

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Ukrainian-born pianist Inna Faliks (www.innafaliks.com) has established herself as one of the most passionately committed, exciting and poetic artists of her generation. After her acclaimed debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at age 15, she has performed on many of the world’s great stages, with numerous orchestras, in solo appearances, and with conductors such as Leonard Slatkin and Keith Lockhart.

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A San Francisco-based architecture firm specializing in residential design. After working in the offices of Fernau+Hartman, William Dutcher, Webb Construction, Phil Mathews, and Rupel Geiszler McLeod, Geoffrey Scott Gainer  started his own practice, Actual-Size Architecture, in 1999.

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Free Chicago Workshop: WordPress for Artists

**BELOW IS ARCHIVAL INFORMATION ABOUT A RECENT PAST EVENT**

Peter McDowell and Ari Salomon will offer the free workshop “WordPress Web sites for Performing and Visual Artists” at the 2011 Creative Chicago Expo on March 12, 2011. The Expo is held at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington and offers free admission.

Using dynamic discussion and visual examples, this workshop will go through the basics of establishing a strong online presence for performing and visual artists with a focus on:

• Branding
  • Simple logo vs Complete visual identity
  • Logotype, logomark, business cards and other matching print collateral
• Content Management System (CMS): How the WordPress CMS can empower the delivery of constantly changing information to key audiences
• The differences between WordPress.org (requiring a web developer) and WordPress.com (free do-it-yourself) services
• Building a strong platform for online marketing
  • SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
  • SEM (search Engine Marketing)
  • Social networking strategies to drive traffic
• How a web site fits into a larger marketing effort
• Costs and timelines: getting your content together before you approach a designer
• Time management: “Don’t be a programmer, be the best artist you can be.”

Peter McDowell and Ari Salomon believe in the necessity of access to effective, attractive, functional web sites for performing and visual artists. McDowell (a veteran of 20 years experience in arts management) and Salomon (a web designer and developer for 15 years) have teamed up since 2009 seeking to provide a low-cost, high quality option in web marketing for artists by creating over a dozen web sites for artists and by training them how to update and maintain their new sites. Their upcoming venture, PerformSites, will launch in Spring 2011.

• Read more and see our event listing here: 2011 Creative Chicago Expo Workshops
• View general info about the event
• Book a one-on-one session with us via the Expo Experts

• Download a pdf of the slides from the presentation