Big news today!

For the last year, we’ve had the great pleasure of working with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum to redesign their website. It didn’t take more than a second after meeting everyone at the Rock Hall to see that they are extremely passionate about the preservation of rock and roll.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum shares an immersive, interactive experience complete with sound, video, and lights, not to mention all kinds of stuff from your favorite rock and roll artists. The music nerd in all of us wet our collective pants over Mick Jagger’s Union Jack cape (from the Stones’ 81-82 world tour), the larger than life-size photography of Jimmy Page in mid-backbend, or the phone in the Annex’s John Lennon exhibit (if it rings, answer it. Trust me). Rick’s mind was blown by the hand written lyrics to “Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division, and David Byrne’s original polaroid artwork for the cover of “More Songs About Buildings and Food.”

But all this needed some help translating to the web. That’s where we came to play.

The home page summarizes the mission of the museum and the events surrounding it, pushing the user to content deep within the site. Almost every aspect of the home page is under editorial control, allowing an editor to promote the most relevant content at any given time.

Deep, media-rich Inductee pages solidify the Rock Hall’s position of authority around its inductees. There’s stuff here you can’t find anywhere else –  induction videos, photo galleries from the ceremony, songs, transcripts of induction speeches, quotes, and links to explore the world around your favorite artist (both inside and outside the Rock Hall).

Events and Exhibits pages capture the history created at the museum and give them life in the online world.

And new content initiatives, like the Rock Hall Blog started during our engagement, are driving lots of interest to those interested in rock and roll.

And even better, folks at the Rock Hall are so excited they are lining up to create new blog posts.

All of this content distribution and promotion is fueled by a flexible, super-powerful, and intuitive CMS. No lie – this thing’s HOT. An editor can control just about every aspect of the content area of the page from one interface, authoring content and relating reusable objects to each other (editorially or through automation). And it’s so easy to use that we trained over 30 people in three days on the inner workings of this tool. Each department has the ability to create and manage their content. That’s quite an improvement over having one person responsible for everything published to the site.

Now Rock Hall is positioned to create and promote deep, rich pages that assist with the Museum’s mission of preservation and education in a way they weren’t able to accomplish previously. And the Story of Rock is not only captured, but told in the way that it should be.

We are excited about the work we did in partnership with the Rock Hall, and loved having the opportunity to work with the great people in Cleveland.