WEBFOOT STUDIOS HIRED TO DESIGN WEBSITE
The Ventura County Star dispatched senior reporter John Krist to retrace the route of Lewis and Clark and examine how the West has changed since they first described it. This yearlong project describes what he learned during his three-month journey by road, river and trail. The project was published in 12 monthly installments online as well as in print.  Melinda Baker of Webfoot Studios was selected to work with the Star’s Alysia Hoffman, project manager, to create and develop a Website.

ENHANCEMENTS USED TO HELP TELL STORY
The enhancements included videos, slideshows, Flash maps and audio logs. Webfoot Studios designed video windows, created a Flash slideshow template, built interactive maps for each installment and linked to audio files. The enhancements were accessible by links at the top of each window and separated by installments therefore allowing the coordination of material as well as making the media available to open on top of the installments to enable viewing of both elements. See examples below;

NAVIGATION AND INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
To coordinate the navigation of the site, Webfoot Studios created an interactive map on the home page that helped give an overall view of what the Website covered and by clicking along the trail the highlights of each installment can be seen and further links found here let the viewer easily drill down. The homepage link and icon placed in the top left of each site page keeps the homepage reference easily accessible.  Each of the twelve installments had a left side menu linking to its own subsections along with a map showing what state or states along the trail are being presented along with bolded dates below the map to orient visitors to the place and the timeline.

Webfoot Studios developed a new style sheet and used color to also help navigate through the site using different colors of links and top right banner backgrounds to help distinguish one section from another. The top right banners were also used as guideposts on each page showing the visitor on what installment they were in as well as what subsection page was being viewed.

COHESIVE LOOK & FEEL DESIGN
The rustic theme was carried out using parchment backgrounds on banners with curled edges and the Papyrus font. Text was kept at no wider than 450 pixels for best reading. A different sized font was used for photo descriptions to differentiate the text and have minimal boxes or lines to distract the viewer. CCS was used to coordinate compatibility between pages.

DETAILS
Copyright permissions were requested as needed such as the historical photos as well as the videos from the Army Corp of Engineers.

CONTENT MANAGEMENT
Adobe Dreamweaver templates were developed for each installment section. They have a two-fold use. 1. Create additional pages with content area only editable area. 2.  All pages on site are attached to a template and global changes can be made by editing the template and saving these changes to all attached pages.  In addition existing online site pages can be downloaded into Dreamweaver and edited in allowable areas only thus keeping the layout structure intact.

The results garnered many awards!