In a previous post I have discussed how we planned to get the audience involved with our programme. We wanted them to send us in 
videos of themselves performing magic tricks, and if we had a good enough turn out, we would use these videos for the countdown on the show. Unfortunately although I posted on endless amounts of magic forums and websites, we didn’t get a response. However a number of our crew members (including myself), sent in our videos, hopefully to get the ball rolling. By the time serious rehearsals had started for the show, we hadn’t got a response, therefore we used video clips found on Youtube and featured them in our show.
However as the time grew closer, all my endless forum posting had payed off! We received a tweet from a young magician called “Steve Bishop” aka “The Magic SB” who sent us one on his magic tricks, I then messaged him asking for permition to feature his videos on our websites and he graciously said yes. Therefore although all our efforts didn’t make a great turnout, we still had outside audience participation!!
This is when I started creating the Get Involved & Videos section of my website.
Ill discuss the Get Involved Part of the website first. The reason I am discussing this part first is because initially the “Get Involved” page and the “Videos” page were the same page.
Above is my original “Get Involved” page which features both details of how to get involved and examples of other videos sent to us. At first I thought this page was great, however as the rest of my site progressed I felt that the audience interactivity information should be more in depth and should have more focus.
Therefore I separated the pages and created the “Get Involved” section, which would primarily be the main focus for our audience participation, as it would have all the details of how to get involved with the show.
I am really proud of this page as it does everything it needs to, its informative, its magical and it fills all the space on the page. Once again the twitter feed widget features, although some people may think using this widget on more than one page is a bit too much, I just felt like it was a key element to our show and a great visual to get our audience motivated.
This then takes me on to the new page, the “Videos” section. I found that the way the videos had featured on the original idea felt lazy, unattractive and amateur. Therefore I had a look at the Wix features and found a “Video Playlist” option, which allowed the page to feature a number of videos in an organized and constructed manner. It may look like a simple page, but in fact it was probably the hardest page to construct.
The reason for this was that all the files had to be on Youtube, and seeing as all the content was spread across various peoples Youtube channels, it made them very hard to locate on the search feature on Wix.
Therefore I took it upon myself to acquire all the videos from various people’s channels and upload them onto one “MagicNetTV” channel. Sorting this channel out too around a day to do, but it allowed all of our group members to easily access the videos for their websites.
Overall I think the changes that I have made to these pages make a massive difference to the flow of the website, hopefully so the audience have a clear indication of what information they can take from where.
. David Bird Media . 