Peninsula Players

Wisconsin Public Radio

The Company: Peninsula Players, Fish Creek, Wisconsin

Type of business:
Peninsula Players have presented more than 500 plays in their 70 year history: everything from Greek tragedy to British farce. Each year thousands of visitors make the Players a keystone of their Door County experience. Imagine a unique combination of beautiful surroundings, great plays, and wonderful actors; strolling along the shores of Green Bay as the brilliant fires of the setting sun warm your soul; relaxing before the show among the dense and fragrant cedar forest with a group of good friends; the exhilaration of being transported to another century of culture as you sit in the beautiful open sided theatre; and laughing till your sides hurt at some of the best actors in the country. That's the Peninsula Players experience.

The Challenge:
The challenge is to create excellent quality graphic logos that will be utilized as line art, bitmapped art, as CMYK files for four color printing and as jpegs for the Peninsula Players Web site on a tight time schedule. Every spring Players general manager Todd Schmidt has to finalize his five shows for the season. Once the shows are chosen, all print and Web projects hit the ground running. In 2003, 3W created the logos, direct mail pieces, the playbook cover and the Web site to publicize the upcoming season. All aspects of the project needed to be wrapped up in a month and a half.

Barbara and Gregg Luhring's part in meeting the challenge:
Barbara Luhring worked with Todd and office manager Audra Baakari to develop the logos. She proofed them via Email as jpegs since the everyone involved was in a different location. Once the logos were finalized, Barbara created 4 color printed pieces. They included a direct mail post card to be sent out announcing the season and an in-county rack card to be displayed at local businesses. All the vendors were provided with digital artwork sent via email, uploaded to an FTP site or provided burned to a CDROM with hard copy.

Gregg Luhring added the logos to the Web site and made all the season copy changes. In addition he updated the online ticket sales form.

In a project such as this, 3W uses technology to take the obstacle of time and make it a non-issue.

Wisconsin Public Radio

The Company: Wisconsin Public Radio, Madison, Wisconsin

Type of business:
Wisconsin Public Radio first began broadcasting continuously in 1917, earning the moniker "the oldest station in the nation". WPR broadcasts over two networks, The Ideas Network and the NPR News and Classical Music Network, on 25 stations and produces national programming heard by over one million people.

The Challenge:
WPR wanted to translate its strengths in high quality audio production content to the broad range of content on the Web. This would enable WPR to continue to thrive as a service of significance to the people of Wisconsin and beyond. The re-organization and re-design WPR's existing Web site would be a major step in this direction.

Barbara and Gregg Luhring's part in meeting the challenge:

Barbara Luhring and Gregg Luhring oversaw all development stages of the Wisconsin Public Radio Web site. They began discussions with then director of WPR, Dana Davis Rehm and wrapped the first phase of the project with current director Gregg Schnirring. 3W Design Group designed an easily navigable website with listeners in mind. WPR news and music along with program notes from the Ideas Network are now easy to find. In addition over 15 "content wizards" were created to allow designated individuals to update program notes of original Wisconsin Public Radio programming. The updates are performed daily

“3W Design created a great graphic look for the site - and working with the WPR staff - the redesign was completed in record time,” says Greg Schnirring, Director of WPR Radio. “The new WPR site includes information regarding our programs, regular programming updates, instructions for our webcasting and links to other public radio sites. Thanks to 3W Design, wpr.org is a must see for all WPR listeners," says Schnirring.

3W Design Group continues to work with WPR streamlining the site's programming and providing Flash animation graphics. The site, over 2500 pages, is now being programmed to create pages "on the fly".

Here are other some highlights of the recent functional/programming update:

Initially we created a Cold Fusion database driven site for WPR that was updated once a day. We created custom software "content wizards" for key personnel and producers to update their program notes once daily. The recent programming update allows pages to be created instantly - on the fly.

We tweaked the search function to allow users to narrow their searches in a more immediate fashion. In addition we switched the search from the WPR database search to a Verity search engine. Due date for the recent update was July 2002. All phases were complete in February 2002.