St. Petersburg Music Guide is a guide to musical heritage and the contemporary music scene of St. Petersburg, Russia. The site features a comprehensive listing of orchestras, groups, performing arts venues, music festivals, and biographies of St. Petersburg musicians. There is a brief history of the city’s music life, a section on libraries and museums that specialize in music. The site also contains musical selections which relate to the text.

I was a sole designer of the website, its graphics and a companion press release.

The original text richly illustrated with photographs was intended for a book, but the author choused to go with a website. My main challenge was to find a way to incorporate lots of text and numerous images into user-friendly web pages. I solved the problem by implementing scrollable pane (JScrolPane) and Thickbox widgets, both written in JavaScript. The fist script allows for a portion of the text to remain visible, and the latter to include multiple small images that can be enlarged.

The site has two JavaScript menus. The mane (left-hand side) menu enables page-to-page navigation and the secondary (right-hand side) one is for navigating within a page. To enhance user experience with musical selections, I incorporated a media player that fits the overall site design.

The text author was highly satisfied with my work calling the design "sleek" and "easy-to-navigate." The website received very favorable reviews.

Online at spbmusicguide.info

© Amy Ballard