04/19/2025: Massive website update!
The new year of 2025 has been a major time of growth for us, and it's meant acknowledging where we need to shed some pieces of our cocoon that we’ve been holding onto for a long time. It was a tough realization that we had outgrown the RARE Discord server where everything started, we’ve got to somewhat act like a real business now and focus our energy on real business decisions. The day of the freeze itself was an emotional time. It has also come with many, smaller upgrades as we mature as a group, one of the most recent being a minor social media rebrand, and a major site change.
Now, the changing of this site isn’t just a sign of our maturing as a group. It’s also me, Notion, lead webweaver here finally getting my feet under me after 3 years of experimentation in the medium. Coding is tough! I decided a few years ago that I was disappointed with the available template-based options for making a portfolio, and it was finally time to crack into some html and css. The first RARE website came about a little later, and was a victim of my early naiveté (seasoned neocities residents would notice the well-used sadgrl template layout). At some point you realize that the inefficient structures built a long time ago are too far removed what what you need now, and you just need to start over with a new form, picking and choosing what needs to be carried forward.
Make your own Website!
Do it! Do it now! The RARE website is a company site, a cool one of course, but a company site all the same, it was a given that we'd have one eventually. But my interest in web dev didn't come from a need for a company site, it was to make a fun indie personal portfolio for my art. I'm going to get on my soapbox for a second here to encourage everyone and their dog to try out the indie web. It doesn’t have to be a proffesional project, or even a portfolio. Back in the days before social media, a personal website was the place to share your thoughts and connect with others.
Stepping down from my soapbox, here's a few good places to start if you're curious:
Change
This new site needed a new icon. Mainly, the colors of the old site had been picked from Gwyn's Raggedy Ann dress print background that was a main part of our graphics for a long time. But now they felt a little too bright. With the new, toned-down color palette, the icon had to match. So it was purely for convenience that I commissioned November - artist of most of our program art - to make us a new icon. I needed a dozen different variants for different uses, transparents and filled-in, white lineart or black lineart or versions with no text. But it still feels like a bit of a send-off, a funeral. Like the discord server, the original icon was made by Gwyn. Our founder and fearless leader. Every little bit had her direct influence and now we’re a bigger group that more and more often needs to make choices without her, especially while we each take time off to pursue our own theater careers. We’re growing up, I suppose. I’ll always miss Gwyn’s version for what it represents, that early earnest drive.
The site is still cute and charming. It reminds me of a vintage valentine or box of chocolates now, more than the bright 80’s teal and pink of the old version. It’s definitely far more grown up though, it feels like it fits this new era of RARE. It’s strange to think back to how different the group has been over the years. The many people who have come and gone, many making a mark on the revival through lost media found or their activity in the community, and many of them moved on to different interests and projects. I look back and I realize just how special it is to have this project and these friends for four years of my life. RARE’s changes reflect those in the lives of the people in it, and back, and back, and back.
Who knows what this site will look like in another three, five years! Lets hope I don't feel the need to do another major shifting.
UI Musings
I love a good sorting system. This is unsurprising to anyone familiar with RARE's archives. While restructuring the new RARE website, the first thing I knew I needed was to map out the sorting system and branching paths that make up the "web". Which pages should be linked to on the main sidebar? Which link collections need separate pages, while some exist on the main “Resources” tab? Should collections of materials about one production be all on one page, or separated into “Photos” “Press” etc? I did some literal mapping with pencil and paper.
The question of the day, I came to realize, is: “what do I want the viewer to focus on?”
Are we a website for an archive, or are we a website for a theater company which also includes these archive pages? I will give you a second to guess which the original was leaning towards, vs now.
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Okay you have your guess? Yes, the original plan for the old site leaned more into an archive. You can see by the “Archive” and “History” pages being separate tabs in the main nav, which caused me some trouble later trying to figure out what fit into which. Now, the site overhaul leans more towards us as a group and a revival effort. What do people want to know about us? What about our plans for the show? How do they get involved or contact us?
This line of thinking again echoes a larger shift in our focus, toward revival more than archival. I do think the archival part is incredibly important, and needs to be as available as possible. But the average person looking at our website will most likely be someone we want to get to support the revival, right?
The “Resources” page captures all of that now, and no more superficial separations between an archive page and a history page. If you are looking for material around the original show, it is all in one place. It still allowed me to make the old archives much more user-friendly by consolidation.
A bit of a realization also came in the form of this new chronological article setup. I think it just fits better with the nature of our production! The email newsletter has felt like the most natural way to talk about events. For instance, if I have an event that is current, I replace almost the entire home page with it. But now if the event is over, now what? Does it go into an archive page exactly how it was on the main? Do I combine that archive page with a longer archive of the photos of that event? Footage? There wasn’t a consistent system. But now there will be. An article for each update or announcement, a new article afterward collecting material, a link to the photo archive (which is doubly linked in the resources page).
With us stepping down a little from our social medias as well, the blog form is a much better opportunity to talk a little more casually while still being long-form. Blogs are just the answer to all your problems.