The problem
Lime Kiln Theater is a live, outdoor performance venue on the outskirts of Lexington, Virginia in the Shenandoah Valley. In the spring of 2014, they were rising out of insolvency under new leadership. To minimize costs, they organized a large volunteer force with various skill sets. For their new web presence, they needed an approach that would:
- Allow a professional web developer to create an eye-catching website
- Allow volunteers with modest technical skills to incrementally update the website
- Minimize monthly hosting costs
- Integrate with Eventbrite for purchasing tickets
We are now entering our fourth year of collaboration with Lime Kiln.
The solution
Finite Wisdom constructed a solution using the following tools:
Weebly
We selected Weebly as the core technology platform for Lime Kiln's website. It allows us, the professional web developers, to create a sophisticated website. It is also easy enough to use that the volunteers at Lime Kiln can make incremental updates on their own, without any support from us.
Weebly is a popular tool for building websites. Used by tens of millions of websites, it features an intuitive, drag-and-drop user interface. It runs in a web browser and also has iOS and Android apps for editing your web site on the go.
Color Block
We selected our own Color Block app for Weebly in order to add blocks of background color to various user interface elements. Weebly does not support this out of the box.
Last year, Weebly introduced their own App Center, allowing third-party developers to create new apps to extend the functionality of the core Weebly toolkit. Finite Wisdom has created several of these apps. This second app, Color Block, addresses a long-standing limitation in Weebly: there has been no mechanism to highlight particular content by putting a solid block of color behind it. Inside the Color Block, one can insert any combination of content blocks - titles, text, images, etc., or even other Color Blocks.
jQuery
We used jQuery for scripting in the browser for a few desired special effects not supported out of the box by Weebly.
A library of JavaScript utilities, jQuery makes it very easy to manipulate the contents of a web page. The library is also cross-platform, available for all major browsers and operating systems, eliminating the often subtle and annoying differences between web browsers. jQuery is the most popularJavaScript library in use today, used on over 60% of all web sites in the world.
CSS3
We used CSS to refine the visual appearance of certain user interface elements when Weebly did not offer the desired variety of options.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a language for describing the look and feel of a web page. In general, HTML provides the structured content for a web page, CSS provides the formatting and JavaScript provides the interactivity.
Eventbrite
We integrated with Eventbrite for the online purchase of the tickets to the Lime Kiln events.
Eventbrite is the world's largest event technology platform. They provide the technology to allow anyone — music festivals, venues, marathons, conferences, hackathons, air guitar contests, political rallies, fundraisers, gaming competitions — to easily sell tickets to their events online.
Take a look
You can browse through their full website at www.limekilntheater.org or take a look at two screenshots we've provided below.
The 2017 home page
Behind the scenes in the Weebly Editor
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