The Lowdown
The Lowdown is a site featuring local entertainment for Lansing, Michigan and its surrounding communities that launched September 1st, 2006 at LansingLowdown.com. It was developed for The State News and is a web adaptation for the weekly printed edition of the Lowdown, the newspaper’s entertainment section. We chose to not only offer content from the printed edition, but to also provide our users with unique featuers like a crowdsource event calendar and a Lansing area dining guide.The project is based on a PHP framework which follows the MVC design pattern. It was developed in house by The State News’ resident programmer, Mike Joseph. I led the team responsible for planning and designing the user experience, which included the development of the site’s graphics, HTML, and CSS.
I worked closely with the editorial and advertising departments because the site required changes in the way content was being published to the web at The State News. Specific goals we had for this website were to:
- create a way to offer editorial content beyond what’s printed in the paper edition.
- revamp advertising practices in order to increase revenue while maintaining separation from editorial content.
- offer more options for users to interact with the site and make moderation of user submitted content simple or unnecessary.
- develop a new brand image for the Lowdown that could extend beyond the current university-based readership of The State News.
Below, I’ve compiled some of the many design decisions our team made during the site’s development.
- Calendar Analysis November 7, 2006
- Advertising Analysis November 7, 2006
- Article Analysis November 7, 2006
- Homepage Analysis November 6, 2006
-
About the author
Eric Puidokas
A web developer living in Santa Monica, California who specializes in client-side web technologies.
-
Portfolio
GridFox - The Grid Layout Firefox Extension
If you can open it in Firefox, you can put a grid on top of it. It's easy to customize, allowing you to create the exact grid you designed your layout around.