Pig on a Hill Productions

For a little while myself and some friends have been thinking about starting a collective of people to work on different projects together. It’s an awesome idea and its starting to get moving now as well, which is even better! The idea is being led by Emilia Buggins who I have worked with quite a lot in the past (pretty much all the web sites I’ve done have been with her, bar my own, and she’s responsible for my original Pig on a Hill logo).

The collective is currently dubbed ‘Sisu’ which is a Finnish term that is “loosely translated into English as strength of will, determination, perseverance, and acting rationally in the face of adversity.”

(Thank you Wikipedia.)

Sisu is a collective of people from different areas of media. As of this time there are 5 people in total (including myself) contributing. Emilia Buggins, Michael Reed, Antonia Heslop, Christina Jager and James Barrow (me). When we get an initial site up and running we will all get to write a bit about who we are and what we do but for now you can click on there names and go to there web sites.

NOTE: Mikee’s website ‘thisisnotaviolin’ is currently under construction and so has a few bugs and no proper font as of writing this. I’ve put it up however because it still shows what he does.

At the moment we are in the brain storming phases and below I’ve added some of my ideas in my area of expertise to put into the pot. This next section is mainly aimed at the lovely lovely members of Sisu.

Website

So looking up domain addresses to register for the website, assuming that ‘Sisu’ is fixed as our name, here are some possible and taken domains:

• sisu.com TAKEN! - Seems to be a vitamins and supplements company,
• sisu.*** - Most of the other suffixes are taken as well and show up as being able to back order,
• sisugroup.com TAKEN! - Technical consultants in electrical systems and plumbing biased in Stockholm (awful website),
• sisudesign.com TAKEN! - Nothing to see there yet though, just a GoDaddy.com holding page,
• sisustudios.com AVAILABLE!
• sisucollective.com AVAILABLE! (maybe a bit long).

The domain we decide to get I can buy and host on my servers (as I can run multiple web sites on my servers) so we just have to decide on one. It can’t be too long and I think we should keep the suffix to be something universal like .com as we are a worldly spread group. Any other ideas for the domain, just give me a shout.

Once that is all worked out then I think we should create a Wordpress blog that can act as the home page until we get the proper site designed and working. Joys of using Wordpress (as some of you probably know) is that we can all have our own login details etc. I have some plans for setting up a section of it that allows each of us to write a little description of who we are, what we do and what we like, etc.

Thinking along the lines of pages, below I’ve laid out a simple plan of some of the pages I think we should include.

• Home Page - The first page you see can be hard to do right, so I would say initially we just make it the blog but I think we should have a bit of fun with this in the long run by adding animations, show reals, special featured content, etc.
• About Us - Who we are and what we do. This section has x amount of subsections as well, one for each member that describes what they do (each written by that member).
• Completed Projects - Sort of speaks for its self but needs a shorter name.
• Current Projects - Again speaks for its self and needs a shorter name. Both completed and current projects will have subsections for each project. There could be a basic template for these subsections so that a project can just be added quicker and easier.
• Contact Us? - In the past Emilia and I have made website that have the contact details on every page rather than on one specific, however as there is quite a lot of us and so there will possibly be a lot of content here, it might need its own page.

Let me know if you think I’ve missed a page or space for content. As always this is just a base and can be changed at any time.

Blog

As I’ve said above somewhere, I think we should have this as an initial base of the site while were designing the actual, all singing all dancing site. Also basing off Wordpress means that theoretically we could actually just build the whole website on it. This would make it more customisable content wise for everybody and hopefully a bit future proof. I think we would also be able to use this as a private posting area to trow ideas around, but that can be played around with as it goes along.

Online storage like Dropbox

I think we should also think about setting up a place that we can upload files to share ideas. I think the best thing for this could be Dropbox as one person can just drop a file into a shared folder and it’ll sync it to everybody. There are other options to look at and we can see what everybody thinks about it and go from there. Anyone who doesn’t have a Dropbox account and wants one, just let me know and I’ll send you a link that’ll give you a bit more space than normal.

Well I think thats it for now. If I think of anymore I’ll put some stuff up. I’m really looking forward to getting into this as its starting to sound really cool. 😄