Theta Media Group Client Website Showcase | Susan Kohler | Writer/Director/Actor/Author/Singer/Songwriter

The Vision

Susan Kohler is a woman of many talents: Writer, Director, Actor (SAG/AFTRA, AEA), Singer, Recording Artist, Songwriter, Choreographer, Author and a Licensed Specialist and Trainer in the non-drug care and treatment of persons suffering from Alzheimer’s and dementia. Needless to say, Susan has kept Randall Michael Tobin and Theta Media Group busy on several fronts (including building three different websites for her ventures), but we’ll limit the scope of this brief to her personal/professional website. Randall built versions 1 and 2 (v2 shown here) of Susan’s website before mobile devices came of age (and Steve Jobs decided not to support the ubiquitous Flash animation technology). Those websites were engaging and compatible during their time, but once smartphones exploded and Google laid down the mobile-friendly law, it was time to move to version 3.

The Website

Susan’s new home page (top) features a redesigned signature logo with a current photo. The main part of the page is the portal from which visitors can jump to any of the five pages devoted to the divisions of her work. Since video has become the standard for presenting acting, music and entertainment to the world, Susan’s new website is filled with many clips. They are hosted on YouTube and embedded onto her various pages with custom poster frames in place (instead of the random poster frames decided upon by YouTube’s algorithm). Having public videos on YouTube is another way for people to find Susan website as YouTube is the #2 search engine after Google.

Susan’s Writer/Director composite page photo (shown here) demonstrates how the video pages present themselves. Also note that embedded videos must be coded correctly or else YouTube’s notorious “suggestions” grid pops up at the end of each video, which is not only distracting (and often tasteless), but can easily lure visitors off the page and into never-never land. We ensure that no such monkey business like that occurs!

The design of the new website follows a common look and feel on Susan’s video-centric pages, with the page title, emphasized body copy/links and footer changing color to correspond with the particular talent being featured. On the page shown, the title/special text/footer color is a golden yellow.

The Result

As is usually the case when clients live and work in the Los Angeles area, Randall and Susan worked side-by-side in the studio to determine the overall look and feel of the site. Once the art direction was agreed upon, Randall continued the coding and content creation after Susan had left. Susan loves her new mobile-friendly and content-rich website and she wrote us a wonderful testimonial:

I’ve had the good fortune to use Theta Media Group on a number of projects: audio recordings, book publishing, video taping/editing, DVD authoring and packaging; all of which have been uniquely translated into a personal website that promotes and generates income from all my creative endeavors. If I have a vision, Randall can bring it to fruition! The sky’s the limit!

Susan Kohler
Actress, Author, Recording Artist
SusanKohler.com

We love working with Susan! Her vision challenges us to come up with solutions that keep our creative juices flowing…

See more of our Client Website Showcase here…