Work / Website design · Photography & drone · Social media
Hooper's Fourth of July Committee
Hooper’s 150th celebration needed one dependable digital home. I built the website from scratch and organized schedules, sponsors, community history, social promotion, photography, and event-day information around a source people could trust.
Challenge and requirements
My husband proposed to me in the park at Hooper's Fourth of July, right after the fireworks went up. So when I found out the celebration was coming up on its 150th year, I wrote to the committee, offered to build them a website and donate the hours, and they took me up on it.
They were starting with nothing at all. No domain, no site, and a schedule that lived wherever someone had last posted it — a printed program, a Facebook comment, word of mouth. That works well enough in a normal year in a town this size. It doesn't work for a 150th, when people are driving in from out of state and want to know what time the parade starts before they get in the car.
Strategy and implementation
- Registered a domain and built the site from scratch in PHP, hosted on its own
- Built out the full schedule, with a page for every event across the celebration
- Ran the Facebook page in the months beforehand, posting schedule changes and keeping people looking forward to it
- Spent the day covering it — photographing, live streaming on Facebook, and flying the drone
- Put the photos up on the site afterwards so the whole town could see them
- Ran an anonymous survey for the committee, and posted thanks to the public, the sponsors and everyone who worked on it
- Rebuilt the site once the celebration had passed, so it looks ahead to next year instead of sitting there as a record of one that's over
- Ran a Facebook ad asking people to send in their memories of past Fourth of Julys
- Still adding to it — local history, a blog, and the memories that keep coming in
Outcome and ongoing use
For the first time the celebration had one place to send everyone, and it held up on the day: the schedule, every event, the sponsors, and afterwards the photographs, so the people who were there could find themselves in them and the ones who couldn't make it could see what they missed.
It didn't stop when the fireworks did. The site has been rebuilt since to look forward rather than back, and it's still growing — the town's history, the memories people keep sending in, and the beginnings of next year. All of it donated. It never occurred to me to invoice the park where I got engaged.