Sandvox Website Profile: “Via Choralis Performance Society”

Contact Via Choralis Performance Society, a Saanich Peninsula auditioned chamber choir, directed by Nicholas Fairbank, and accompanied by Jennifer Mitchell. We perform at St. Elizabeth RC Church in Sidney BC and rehearse in Saanichton across from the Saanich Peninsula Hospital, at the Saanichton Bible Fellowship Church. We are looking for new singers from all voice categories: soprano, alto, bass or tenor. The choir performs a wide repertoire ranging from Renaissance madrigals and choral classics to the finest in contemporary works.

Our audience includes classical choral music lovers, and people who love to sing. People who live on the Saanich Peninsula might find our site interesting. Potential singers should have some previous choral experience and basic sight-reading skills. We also perform at retirement homes and residences as a community service.

Our chamber choir would appeal to people who live on the Saanich Peninsula. Our concerts are almost always in the afternoon, making travel to and from our concerts less of a concern for people who prefer not to drive at night. Our rehearsals are Monday evenings at Saanichton Bible Fellowship Church on Mount Newton Cross Road, across from the Saanich Peninsula Hospital.

I read on one of the other sites profiled by Karelia, that they weren't able to put up their own photo in the banner. Very small photos take up a small area usually in the centre of the banner space, larger photos don't fit well, so you need to crop them and adjust the dimensions so they fit properly. Using the preview application that comes with the MAC, you can crop and change the dimensions of a photo so that it fits better as a banner.

We chose this particular Sandvox design because the colours are warm, and we could use our own banner and title. Additional features that were important? There had to be sufficient room for all the menu items to fit in one row; the photo grid had to look elegant; we wanted to be able to change the Sandvox title font, and the behaviour and locations of pagelets and sidebars was important. There are other designs that are quite acceptable too. The ones I definitely didn't want to use were those that didn't allow us to use a custom banner, and those where the menu and title interfered with the banner, or the title would get lost inside the banner, or the menu items would flow into two rows.

Our initial content was copied and pasted from the old website. I linked to documents, photos and web pages from the old site, as well as dropped in content from my own computer. I uploaded some pdf files to our server so that I can link via a URL rather than using a file download. I spent a great deal of time modifying photos to fit in the banner space. It was interesting to experiment with different banners, adding titles within a photo, creating our own banner from artwork, etc. It is quite thrilling to give our site a new look by changing the banner photo, or by changing the font characteristics for the website title. When trying out banners (and logos, for that matter), it is a good idea to experiment with different sizes of media, adding your own titles, or using the Sandvox titles, changing the shape, (cropping, stretching, squeezing, flipping or rotating them), adjusting the colour intensity, etc. The more you play with it the more amazing the results.