New website puts Pride info front and center in more user-friendly format
Dallas’ annual Pride parade, the Alan Ross Texas Freedom Parade, is right around the corner. And Dallas Tavern Guild, which organizes the parade, the annual Festival in Lee Park after the parade and the Voice of Pride singing competition, is rolling out a new Dallas Pride website.
DallasPride.org, which launched Aug. 7, puts Dallas’ Pride events front and center, said Tavern Guild Executive Director Michael Doughman.
“The last three or four years, when we would check the hits on the website, and what we always found was that at least 80 percent of the visits to the site focused around Pride and all the Pride events,” he said. “So we decided to make the site be more about Pride.”
The idea, Doughman said, was to make the site more user friendly and easier to navigate.
“The whole idea was to put the Pride event information up front and to streamline the whole site so that it is easier for visitors to find what they are looking for,” he said. The new website has only five tabs, in addition to the home page, and three of the five are focused on Pride events. The fourth is the “Contact Us” tab and the fifth is the “About Us” tab.
Doughman said all the information on the Tavern Guild — including its history and a list of its member clubs — is located under the “About Us” tab.
Doughman said that the new website was born last year when David Berryman, the independent consultant who heads up organizing efforts for the parade and other Dallas Pride events, came to him and Tavern Guild board members to suggest the change. Shortly after, Jimmy Bartlett, who designed and maintained the Tavern Guild website, told Doughman that he would be moving most of his website clients to the WordPress platform.
“He said that WordPress is easier to use and makes it easier to maintain and update the websites. He also said that with WordPress, people would be able to access our site more easily through their smart phones and other mobile devices, without having to download a new app,” Doughman said. “We talked about it, and we decided that would be the perfect time to change the website, since it would already be moving to WordPress.”
He said that the Tavern Guild’s previous website, DallasTavernGuild.org, is still online, but is set up to redirect visitors to the new site. By parade weekend, the old site will be shut down completely.
Although the new site has been operational for less than a month, Doughman said the response has been overwhelmingly positive.
“It is more streamlined and more visual, with more images now rather than a lot of [small] copy,” Doughman said. “We’re finding that people want to stay on the site longer now.
“With the parade happening in just three weeks, this is the time of year that we always get the most traffic anyway. The daily hits always jump way up as people come to the site looking for information on Voice of Pride or the parade or the festival, and people who are coming in from out of town for the parade come looking for deals on hotels,” he said. “But so far, all the comments we are getting on the new site are very positive. People really seem to like it. And we are very pleased.”
This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition August 29, 2014.