I got some excit­ing news the other day: my pet project web site, the Perth Inter­na­tional Arts Fes­ti­val, has been nom­i­nated in the events cat­e­gory of the 11th Annual Webby Awards (the so-called “Oscars of the Internet”).

The offi­cial win­ners are announced at the begin­ning of May — but here’s the inter­est­ing part: there’s also a People’s Voice Award for each cat­e­gory, voted by vis­i­tors to the site. So if you’d like to see a Fuse­box 4.1/ColdFusion 7 site in the winner’s cir­cle, sign up to vote now — you have until April 27, but don’t wait that long! You’ll find the Fes­ti­val site under Web­sites > Liv­ing > Events.

I’ve worked on the Fes­ti­val web site for the last five fes­ti­vals, first while work­ing at my for­mer employer Perth­Web and this year with a co-sponsorship deal under my own busi­ness name, Clever Starfish.

The fes­ti­val has very par­tic­u­lar require­ments, so I wrote a cus­tom con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem for them for the 2003 Fes­ti­val, using Cold­Fu­sion 5 and Fuse­box 3. The back­end of the sys­tem has been tweaked a lit­tle each year as the events struc­ture has changed, but the over­all sys­tem is still solid and ris­ing admirably to the job — so Fuse­box 3 it still remains. The server was upgraded in the mean­time to Cold­Fu­sion MX, and then Cold­Fu­sion 7. The front end of the site was orig­i­nally Fuse­box 3 as well, but for the 2007 Fes­ti­val, it was rebuilt with Fuse­box 4.1 — and the speed increase was def­i­nitely notice­able. The more com­plex lay­out pos­si­bil­i­ties were also a huge bonus.

For 2007, the Fes­ti­val really decided to make the web site a cen­tral part of their mar­ket­ing strat­egy, and so got the brand­ing agency work­ing on the brochure and poster, Block Brand­ing, involved with the design. The end result looks stun­ning and dis­tinc­tive — espe­cially with to the custom-designed font for the nav­i­ga­tion and head­ings. Even after work­ing on it for so long I didn’t get tired of look­ing at it, as usu­ally hap­pens with sites I’m work­ing on. And for­get the stereo­types about print design­ers not “get­ting” the web and being dif­fi­cult: Isabel, the designer at Block, was fan­tas­tic to work with.

We’re all pretty excited about the nom­i­na­tion, and the whole team are are going to be inter­viewed by a local news­pa­per on Mon­day about the site. Here’s hop­ing for some more good news in May!