Putting a New Face on Film.com By Justin Hibbard

Last summer, movie critic Lucy Mohl decided to give her Web site, Film.com, a treatment familiar to Hollywood stars and HTML pages alike -- a face-lift. But with thousands of documents to reorganize and recode, the job required more than a quick slice and stitch. So Mohl assembled a crack redesign team and, after a fruitful collaboration, posted a site that drew 50 percent more visits during its first week online. Film.com now logs more than 300,000 visits, or 1 million page views, per month -- numbers that have helped the startup achieve its long-standing goal of attracting national advertisers. The improved site convinced San Francisco-based ad sales firm WebRep to sign Film.com, which now sports banners for companies such as Apple Computer. Neil Monnens, a principal at WebRep, says Film.com had all the features he looks for in a commercially viable site. How'd They Do It? Before its face-lift, Film.com boasted quality content and heavy traffic, but it lacked the brand identity and seamless navigation that are the marks of expert design. Says Mohl, "It was clear as the site was growing and getting popular that to take what we were doing to the next level required professional design. That's when we turned to Phinney/Bischoff." A Seattle firm specializing in new media, Phinney/Bischoff Design House collaborated on the project with Mohl and Seattle-based Internet service provider Point of Presence Company, which also hosts Film.com. After Mohl reorganized the site's contents, the designers focused on improving the front page, originally an unwieldy table of contents. They also created a template for the internal pages, branding each page with an identical logo and navigation bar. Says Neil Robertson, senior new media designer at Phinney/Bischoff, "We wanted to make sure that no matter where you went on the site, you knew you were in Film.com." Glenn Fleishman Implementing the changes fell to Glenn Fleishman, Web developer and principal at Point of Presence. Given the volume of pages, manual HTML coding was out of the question. Instead, Fleishman wrote a Perl script that updated almost every page on the fly in about 15 minutes -- nary a user saw a sign saying "this page under construction." Fleishman also authored several no-parse header scripts for the front page, one of which assigns a cookie to each browser, allowing Point of Presence to track unique visits using Interse's Market Focus software. The other scripts redirect AOL and Lynx browsers to a text-only version of the site. Customized Criticism The new Film.com consists almost entirely of static pages. But the next twist in the site's saga will be the addition of a relational database, which will allow users to create personal screening rooms tailored to their tastes. Says Mohl, "They'll be able to say, I love the films of this director, or I love the films of this actor, so let me know what information is out there on these people, past, present and future." Film.com will use an RDBS owned by Point of Presence, which is still shopping for a system. Once the database is in place, Fleishman plans to add other dynamic features. "We can introduce better cross-referencing," he says. "So anytime Braveheart is mentioned anywhere on the site, [the database] could automatically build a hyperlink to the reviews." Mohl hopes custom information delivery will distinguish Film.com from its competitors. She has positioned her site not as an exhaustive archive but as a service that filters out the bad and recommends the good. Says Mohl, "There are lots of sites that deliver raw information. Our goal is to be the number-one source for critical information. We're the site that stands up and says, this is good and that isn't." Many Cooks in the Kitchen Like filmmaking, Web development is a collaborative art. And Film.com's success is a testimony to the wisdom of teaming a variety of experts on a face-lift project. "When it comes time to go to the next level," Mohl says, "what you really want is to have all your ducks in a row. And that means you've got to have good technical people, good content people and good design people." Karl Bischoff, vice-president and new media director at Phinney/Bischoff Design House, says the project was the first in which he and his staff worked side by side with a client. Relinquishing the organizational duties to Mohl allowed the designers to evaluate the site maps objectively, viewing them from the perspective of the average user. "We try to do all our design work that way," Bischoff says, "as if we were the audience, and saying, what if I wanted to find a movie, how would I know where to go and what to do?" The designers also collaborated successfully with Fleishman, whose background in graphic design helped him understand their objectives. So productive was the partnership, in fact, that Point of Presence and Phinney/Bischoff have since formed a strategic alliance to develop other sites together. With clients such as Microsoft on their roster, it looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

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Last updated: 1 August 1996