Birmingham City of Culture

With the short list announced for the inaugural UK City of Culture we’re happy to say that Birmingham made the list! The other contenders are Londonderry, Norwich and Sheffield.

We’ve put the website live, so get on there and get posting why you think Birmingham should win. You can also have a look at the advocates section for inspiration from one of the dozens of locals backing the bid.

About the site

The lions share of the work was done by Sheldon Els, I occasionally gave a helping hand when needed.

The site is running from the latest and greatest versions of our php framework and CMS, with some custom modules to control the cultural facts and the like.

Info

With something as large scale as a national bid to be the cultural centre of the country, there is lots and lots of information about the process. Very dry and boring, but the site has to contain that information, so theres plenty of copy and keywords at least.

Not all of the fact and figures are boring, there are plenty of tit-bits about Birmingham mixed in to keep it interesting and of course quotes and stories from the local celebrities backing the bid.

Joining In

If you don’t agree with their options, you can have your own say in the Join the Big Conversation section.

If you want to see Birmingham crowned the City of Culture for 2013 you can help out by uploading images and movies (to flickr and vimeo respectively) to the Share segment of the website.

Mash-tastic

The interactive side of things I’ve mentioned are mostly provided by external services at the back end with our cms pulling it together on the front.

The Big Conversation section makes use of Disqus masquerading as a very basic forum system. With the threaded nature of their comments and uniqueness based on the URL it works very nicely!

With this kind of high profile site the number of people uploading videos and photos could quite easily reach large numbers, that can cause performance problems and in worst case even take down servers. To avoid this kind of mess we make use of vimeo for videos (re-encoding is heavy work and these guys do it well), and flickr for photos. Both are sync’d with our cms to give a seamless appearance.

EDIT (Jul 30 2010): Well, Birmingham didn’t win, the City of Culture for 2013 is Londonderry, such a shame, but here’s hoping we get it next time!