After choosing the subject matter of this exhibition and doing extensive research, I was initially planning on focusing it more on the music and making it about showing people the various different types of cumbia that exist through songs embedded in a single blog. I chose a blog as it seemed to me to be a good middle ground in that it allows customization, but is still structured enough to be simple to construct.
Due to copyright issues the music only exhibition did not seem possible so after looking at a few other mediums (photos and video) I decided to broaden the content to include these, as the visual aspect of cumbia was also very interesting and video was the only real way of showing cumbia dancing.
Throughout the exhibition then, I’ve included photos and video that relate to the subject matter. Most of the photos are from flickr, and the videos are embedded through YouTube. All photos include a link to the source from which they came.
The audio files I decided to use are mainly DJ mixes and remixes of cumbia which were made and uploaded online by their creators freely. I also used a 30 second sample of another song instead of the full version.
Yahoo Media Player seemed like the most user friendly tool to use for the music. The HTML coding is very simple and allows multiple files on one page to be played. The slide across bar is also more aesthetically pleasing than any other programs that do the same thing.
The only problem I found came about when I realised that to make it work as smoothly as possible I would have to have the entire exhibition on one page or risk interrupting the audio every time someone navigated to a new page. This was something that I didn’t want to do as it would make the site less visually pleasing and less user-friendly. The original plan I wanted to stick with was have a navigation bar either on the left or the right to allow users to access any part of the site at any time. The solution I came up with was to have a separate page for all the sound files which users could refer to at any time. The original idea with this was to have a new window open up, but my JavaScript skills did not allow me to execute this part of the site to my satisfaction. Ideally the sounds page would have opened up in front of the main page, inside a specific window size, and all subsequent links to the sounds page would have lead to this same window already open.
Also scattered through the various sections of the site are external links to further information and media relating to cumbia. I had initially planned to have an "online resources" section with all these links and more but I decided against as it would have made it the site a lot more like the reference site question (number 3) and I was trying to focus more on the specifics of the exhibition.
The layout and look of the blog has a specific visual theme taken from the custom header which I made for it. The black background makes the bright colours stand out more also. In order to make it more interesting I added some feeds from flick with instructions to show photos with specific tags related to cumbia.
In terms of size I kept the exhibition focused on the basics needed to give a user a good introduction to cumbia, its history, dance and a few modern case studies. The relatively small size meant that I could use the format of a blog to construct it. The small number of navigation headings means that any user will be more inclined to click through the whole site.
