Independent Documentary Filmmaker & IU Professor Emeritus | Bloomington, IN
The Challenge
Ron Osgood is an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and IU Media School Professor Emeritus with a body of work spanning three decades — from early institutional productions to the Emmy-winning Just Like Me: The Vietnam War/The American War and his latest release, I Do Remember. His web presence, however, hadn’t kept pace with his career.
Ron’s site was locked into an aging Weebly platform, running on outdated HTTP, and offered no real way to showcase individual films for the audiences that matter most: film festival programmers, university booking coordinators, and public television curators. He needed a professional home base — not to sell anything, just to have a credible, working link he could point people to when it counted.
The Approach
We started with the fundamentals and built outward. Rather than force documentaries into generic blog posts, we gave Ron’s films their own dedicated home in WordPress:
Migration & Infrastructure Moved Ron off Weebly entirely to a secure, self-managed WordPress environment on GreenGeeks hosting. Cleaned up DNS, installed SSL, and simplified his URL structure from www.ronosgood.com down to a clean ronosgood.com.
A Custom Film Archive Built a dedicated Films management system using Custom Post Types and Advanced Custom Fields — giving Ron a proper archive page and individual film templates that automatically format posters, trailers, synopses, and metadata consistently every time.
A Design System Built Around the Work Developed a monochromatic black, white, and gray palette paired with a modern Montserrat + Inter typography system — letting Ron’s film stills and posters provide all the color the site needs. Every page, from the homepage MetaSlider gallery to the redesigned About page’s academic-and-Emmy®-achievement layout, was built to keep focus on the work itself.
A Personal Brand Detail Designed a custom VW bus site icon, a quiet nod to I Do Remember and the 1972 road trip at the heart of that film — the kind of detail that makes a site feel like it belongs to one filmmaker and no one else.
Data & Independence Integrated Google Site Kit for built-in Analytics and Search Console access, and delivered a complete films archive of drafted content — Shirts and Skins, the Trouble No More shorts, Climate Change in National Parks, Liberty Call, and his early IU Telecommunications work — ready for Ron to publish on his own schedule, along with a step-by-step guide for adding future films himself.
The Result
A clean, professional, fast-loading site that does exactly what Ron needed: gives him a credible presence for film festival submissions, a home for his growing filmography, and full ownership of his own web platform — no walled gardens, no subscription lock-in, and no unnecessary complexity.
Services provided: WordPress migration & hosting setup, custom Films post type & ACF development, site architecture & UI design, typography & brand system, Google Analytics/Search Console integration, client training & documentation