A Website for Lost in La Mancha Phil Stubbs designed and maintained a website to accompany the release of the feature film Lost in La Mancha. The film was a hit at many film festivals. It had a successful theatrical run around the world, and it gathered a nomination for BAFTA award in 2003. In fact it became one of the highest grossing documentaries of all time, and its website was a key component in publicising the film around the world. Lucy Darwin, the film's producer, commented "Phil was creative, fast, efficient, organised and brilliantly helpful regarding all aspects of the work required to set up and maintain our website." Lost in La Mancha tells the story of filmmaker Terry Gilliam's attempt to make his own film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Directed by Louis Pepe and Keith Fulton, and produced by Lucy Darwin, Lost in La Mancha is at turns tragic and hilarious, as calamity strikes again and again. Phil Stubbs assembled a website that contained the story of the picture, with plenty of intriguing behind-the-scenes photographs from Gilliam's set. It was important that the design matched the existing sales material already created for the film. A further crucial element was that the initial pages should be very quick to load, which is extremely important where some users can be very fickle and abandon downloading if a page takes too long to appear. The layout of each page follows a theme, and it was easy to change the style of all of the pages at the same time, since the site uses Customised Style Sheets. The content was also highly readable, made up of the background to the picture and also exclusive interviews with directors and producer conducted by Phil. And many changes were made to the site by Phil as further release information became available. He also took responsibility for ensuring that the website files were available to everybody around the world at all times on a reliable server. At the time of the US release in early 2003 alone, over 35,000 people visited the site. Phil created weekly reports of how many people visited the website. This information gave the distributors of the film a crucial yardstick of the success of their marketing. In order to get so many people to visit the site, it was important to ensure that the site was mentioned in as many places as possible. The website address, www.lostinlamancha.com was incorporated on the marketing material on the film's advertisements. The site had links to it from many newspapers and other popular websites around the world. Lucy Darwin added, "I know from the many enquiries that were generated as a direct result of his work that the site was clear and user-friendly. I would not hesitate in recommending Phil to others interested in setting up this kind of website as he rose to the challenge of dealing with a truly international team and his enthusiasm has never wavered. Lost In La Mancha was a great example of the kind of project that can be helped by an effective website - and a year after we began, it's still being referenced by a world-wide audience and helping to reach film fans everywhere." Contact Phil at phil@smart.co.uk Back to smart homepage