Site updates

I've spent most of the past couple of days making updates to the site. Spending time on this kind of grunt work is really frustrating to me -- not so much because I see myself as being "above" those sorts of efforts, but because it's so time-consuming. English is my first language, not HTML, and I always have the sense that with the things that take me hours to do, there's any number of people who could take care of it in a matter of minutes.

There's also my frustration with the fact that I can spend so much time on something and have it still look like ass. There's really only two things that I'm pleased with regarding the site:

1) Its simplicity. One of my pet peeves are theatre websites that use Flash and Java and take twenty minutes for my internet connection to catch up to. When I go to a website, I want information that's easily accessible, and the site provides that.

2) Its tone, which is the only real advantage of doing everything myself. I just don't understand why so many small theatre companies strive after some cold, formal, "professional"-sounding tone. A directness of communication between artists and audience is one of the advantages of a small company.

That said, I certainly wouldn't object to a much slicker *appearance* to the site -- or, at least, something that didn't scream "My First Website -- From PlaySkool!"

Then again, perhaps something with lots of interesting content, wrapped up in crap visuals, is a pretty fair representation of what the company does, sigh.