From The Red Carpet was a 60 second show screened in Odeon, Cineworld, IMAX and Picturehouse cinemas across the UK. The show includes exclusive interviews from premieres and film events across the UK and beyond

FTRC.com was the show’s accompanying website where behind the scenes tidbits, pictures and film news are published daily. The From The Red Carpet show was produced by DCM, a UK cinema advertising company.

The FTRC team had chosen to use the web publishing platform WordPress and had chosen a theme from one of the thousands freely available online. I was asked to help the FTRC team customise and develop the theme they were using for the site.

I started by working with them to understand their target audience and goals for the site. Understanding this we were able to draw up a list of features and changes that they wanted to have included in the site.

They wanted to:

• include their social media presence on the site
• further customise the design to align it with their branding
• add advertising space for sponsors
• make it easier to track the site’s performance.

I created a private, mirrored version of the site for testing and demonstrating the changes, allowing the FTRC team to see the changes online without interrupting the continued running of the live site.

I worked through the changes one at a time first adding Facebook and Twitter integration to the FTRC.com site and adding FTRC.com information to their Twitter and Facebook pages.

I then helped them evaluate several difference advert management plug-ins that are available for WordPress. Settling on two that were used to drive the two different types of adverts displayed on the site.

I also helped them migrated the site from the free WordPress.com hosting to a private hosting solution that allowed more control over the setup and running of the site. Finally, I also added Google Analytics to the site so visitor activity could be tracked.