An interview with Valley Cultural Center’s President & CEO, Jim Kinsey
by Jen Pennington
2010 marked a new beginning for long-time Rhizome client, the Valley Cultural Center. A non-profit, founded in 1975 to assist the Los Angeles City Department of Recreation & Parks in bringing arts and culture to the San Fernando Valley. The Valley Cultural Center has been at the forefront of culture, arts, and arts education in the community for more than thirty-five years.
Every year the Valley Cultural Center presents free concerts in Warner Park. Featuring rock, classical, jazz, R&B, Latino pop, country, cowboy, Dixieland, folk, and more, their concerts entertain more than 140,000 Valley residents and visitors each year and are the cornerstone of Sunday afternoons in the San Fernando Valley. More recently this has expanded to Saturday evening movie nights.
Though we have worked together for eight years, this was the first year VCC would bring the production of their concert and movie programs in-house. This meant Rhizome had control over how the content in the program was presented in its entirety, not just a few random pages. We brought in Graphics Plus our print partner to help with all the pre-press and ad placements before the job was electronically delivered and printed in California. It also meant revamping the old www.valleycultural.org website. As President, Jim also wanted to green the events as much as possible and figure out a way to reach out to the community more. Even the concert and movie titles changed from Concerts and Movies in the Park, to Concerts and Movies on the Green. Before we knew it, this ambitious project produced some of the best results we had seen. (more…)
by James McGrath
Last week WordPress released ‘Thelonius’ or WordPress 3.0, the latest version of their popular CMS.
There are a number of new features and upgrades in this version of WordPress that make this blogging platform even more powerful and usable that previous versions.
Here are the highlights:
- WordPress and WordPress MU have merged, allowing the management of multiple sites (called Multisite) from one WordPress installation.
- New default theme “Twenty Ten” takes full advantage of the current features of WordPress.
- New custom menu management feature, allows creation of custom menus combining posts, pages, categories, tags, and links for use in theme menus or widgets.
- Custom header and background APIs.
- Contextual help text accessed under the Help tab of every screen in the WordPress administration.
- Ability to set the admin username and password during installation.
- Bulk updating of themes with an automatic maintenance mode during the process.
- Support for shortlinks.
- Improved Custom post types and custom taxonomies including hierarchical (category-style) support. (Try the Custom Post Type UI or GD Custom Posts And Taxonomies Tools plugins to see the possibilities.)
- A lighter admin color scheme to increase accessibility and put the focus more squarely on your content.
(more…)
by Jen Pennington
Today I attended a Webinar by Guy Kawasaki on WebEx, entitled, Get “Social” with Guy Kawasaki, his secrets plus live Q&A. Mr Kawasaki is a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, a columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine, a previous Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc. and author of nine books including Reality Check, The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way.
Mr. Kawasaki’s talk today demonstrated how he uses Twitter as a marketing weapon. He wisked back and forth showing examples of how he sets his tweets up to repeat every so often during the day, while searching for new content, garnering new followers, and really how to get the most out of Twitter. He actually offered up some great stuff that got me rethinking Twitter and how I can serve my clients and my own business better.
One of the biggest takeaways both James and I got out of the event was his language around getting people to notice you. He spoke eloquently about how it’s easy to be charming, fascinating and enchanting if you are a big celebrity, but much harder to do when you are not. (more…)
by Jen Pennington and James McGrath
We’ve been quietly experimenting on some really amazing new sites including our own. Our work over the last six months is more focused on creating great custom designs using WordPress blog technology to allow our customers access to their content. It’s not just for blogs. That’s right, we’re teaching our clients how to make updates and we proudly admit it. (more…)
by Jen Pennington
This little guide goes out to all photographers, designers, and clients. It is your chance to stand up and fight against the evil beige background that is often found behind so many uninviting corporate portraits. In the Rhizome world, beige walls are evil. They are subtle purveyors of sadness and a subliminal identification with the DMV (not a good experience normally). Mug shots at the police station at least have context and props! And for Pete’s sake, even the big department stores spice up their backgrounds (ok, the mottled texture is not so great either, but let’s not go there). So I invite all my fellow business people to stand with me and say, “Death to the beige wall!” (more…)
