Pony Express Documentary Website

In late 2010, I was asked by my sister Kristen to help her and partner CJ LongHammer create a new identity for their documentary, 1861: The Spirit of the Pony Express, on the Web. They had several key goals in mind: most importantly, they wanted to show their work off with a look and style that matched the rugged heart and soul of the West. Kristen and CJ shared a mountain of photographs with views of worn-out barns, rolling plains, quiet prairies, and sleepy towns. I quickly fell in love with the project. Finally! It was an opportunity to blend extreme textures with depictions of physical objects - gnarled boards, stained metals, and worn parchments.

Kristen and CJ also gave me the line that everybody seems to have on the tips of the their tongues: they, despite having limited exposure to Web technologies and markup, wanted to fill in the site content without always relying on me to do it for them. I certainly appreciated the sentiment, but the scope of their vision meant that one giant rich text box per page wouldn't give them enough control over the presentation. So I set to work designing a simple yet powerful means of constructing content pages on the site without knowing anything much about HTML or CSS.

Finally, they excitedly shared with me their vision for an interactive map that could work on multiple levels: it could introduce more people to the Great West of the Pony Express, chronicle the adventure that they had personally undertaken some months back hitched to the Pony Express re-ride caravan, and highlight towns and businesses all along the inter-state trail. For me, this sounded like a simple map with eight or nine points. Shortly afterward, Kristen pulled a surprise on me when she informed me that the two of them had enough information to highlight about 40 stops. Forty!

Sure, the project seemed like a lot of work, but this was my sister and I saw plenty of exciting challenges looming on the horizon. I don't take on new projects that don't excite me for some reason or another. Plus, I had some feathers in my cap: I had previously constructed a site-building platform in Ruby on Rails 3 with my pal August. It came together pretty quickly and provided a healthy dose of power and flexibility.

The Pony Express Documentary site started, however, in Photoshop. I played around with all sorts of styles, both light and dark, before deciding on a set of detailed, free wood textures. I modeled the visual style of the site as if it were composed of paper posters, Pony Express recruitment flyers, and pieces of books nailed to the side of a barn or the inside of a saloon. I found a wealth of grungy paper textures on the Web that served both as inspiration and starting placed for my own texture work.

The final site design is an amalgamation of merged textures and some new work of my own. Please see this page on the site for credits to the great online artists whose work helped me develop the visual style. Strong texture work is a really difficult thing to do right, but it's easy to know when the textures have finally fallen into place perfectly.

When Kristen, CJ, or another site administrator goes to edit a page on the site, they tap into a robust yet pain-free page builder. Each new site page is composed of columns, which in turn contain blocks. There can be as many or as few blocks as desired, and they can be moved around at will. When a page editor hovers over a content block, she gets the ability to edit, move, or delete the block from the page. And the brilliant ck-editor is turned on by default to allow page editors to use a word processor-style rich text editor.

Even more interesting is the photo manager, which integrates ck-editor with the paperclip Rails gem to prepare every uploaded graphic from their computers in sizes that make sense for different areas of the site. Every photo added to a site page can be featured as part of the gallery. I use the fancybox jQuery plugin for an elegant way of quickly perusing full-size versions of uploaded photos. And best of all, Kristen and CJ seem to be completely comfortable using this system for putting in lots of site content!

The last piece of the puzzle was the interactive Pony Express trail map. I knew that Kristen and CJ had a whole mess of different towns and points of interest to highlight, and thus I needed to devise a good method of organizing the points that also made sense alongside the map itself. And I didn't want to just force visitors to either click a point on a map with a whole bunch of points or find a point of interest in a big list, so I created a solution that offers both.

There's some simple Javascript to highlight points of interest on the map when a visitor hovers over the name of the point in the menu system. To save on space, the list is condensed with Javascript first into a list of states, and as the visitor clicks on a state, the menu will update to show milestones inside that state. Kristen and CJ can also edit pages for trail towns using the exact same system as they use for the other site pages - I integrated the map in with the rest of the content manager in a way that they thought seemed easy to use.