www.manitoahbee.com

Manito Ahbee

 
 

A Celebration of Aboriginal Culture in Manitoba

One the largest Aboriginal Cultural festivals in Western Canada celebrating indigenous arts, culture, and music. The new design for this site was developed to feature the dynamic beauty of aboriginal culture. The functionality of the site was developed to provide easy access to all of the events, demonstrations, and workshops happening during the festival.

Along with the history of the festival, a calendar of events with full descriptions of the events, demonstrations, and workshops is available. For competitions, there are registrations that can be done through the website. The Aboriginal Music Awards is a major highlight of the festival. Visitors can see who has been nominated for the awards, and as the awards take place, an administrator has the ability to update the results as they occur.

Countdown
to the Festival

The main goal of the Manito Ahbee homepage is to build up anticipation for the annual Manito Ahbee festival. The key feature is a large configurable countdown overtop of a subtle video of previous festivities. As the festival gets closer, the list of events gets slotted in as a slider of bold imagery.

Instead of bombarding site visitors with information, the Manito Ahbee homepage is a teaser trailer of things to come.

Schedule of Events

When the annual Manito Ahbee Festival kicks off, there are many individual events happening over the course of four to five days. The schedule page helps site visitors keep track of what's happening when.

Rather than pigeon-hole administrators into summarizing an event in a single text-block, the schedule editors link over to any other content area of the site. This allows Manito Ahbee to flesh out event descriptions with pages and subpages of information as needed, giving them the elbow room to include download lists, contact forms, and more.

Within the schedule editors themselves is just enough to create the calendar page. A little extra data allows the events to be featured on the homepage as the date of the festival approaches. It's this sort of custom-built tools that allow us to fit the website to Manito Ahbee's needs, rather than the other way around.

Your Award Nominees

The annual Indigenous Music Awards recognizes the accomplishments of Indigenous recording artists and music industry professionals from around the globe. We were honored to help Manito Ahbee bring this award celebration online.

After the nominees are selected for each of the Indigenous Music Awards categories, site administrators can automatically update the publlic nominees page. Each individual artist gets their own nominee profile page, complete with any submitted music and video media provided during the submissions process.

Site visitors can review each and every one of the year's Indigenous Music Awards nominees, including how well they fared in past award ceremonies. It's a gallery of the best and brightest in the music community!

Online Artist Submissions

In previous years, artists applied for the Indigenous Music Awards by filling out and handing in pages of paper, then following up by sending in CDs or USB sticks of media. We were able to help Manito Ahbee update that whole process with a custom-built online submission area.

Each year, artists are now able to log in and update their existing submission profiles with updated photography and information. Then, using the secure forms provided, they can submit for any award categories they qualify for by just uploading the appropriate data. Both the artists and the site admnistrators are notified by email at each critical step, ensuring communication throughout the process.

Afterwards, it's just a short checklist of steps away from setting up for next year's Indigenous Music Awards. And each successful year is built upon the previous year's familiarity and refinement.