Before
After
What Happened
The Broadway Bach Ensemble is a volunteer orchestra based in the upper west side of Manhattan. Founded over twenty years ago, it does three free concerts every season and maintains very high standards of musicianship. I was asked to add board membership to my trumpet playing duties, and take on the task of reworking the site. Working with the kind of tight budget you'd expect from a very small nonprofit, the need was for a more attractive site that could be better used to communicate with members on short notice, without incurring any extra costs.
The old site was a three-part frameset, done in Front Page. It had all the usual problems, outdated clunky code, stale look. Littered with font and other formatting tags, updating it was difficult. It had the frameset which wasn't serving any useful purpose, and the forms were broken so the board wasn't get the user feedback it wanted.
The new design offers pull-down menus across the top, and a montage of Bach-related and orchestra member photos. The code behind is (with the exception of the pull-down menus) pure css and very simple, so the next redesign should be a lot easier.