Streaming Audio, e-Commerce, Mailing List, Image Galleries and Custom Designed Front Page – Everything the Independent Artist Needs
music2work2 is Andrew’s music business and has been online in various guises since 2006. It was originally conceived as a Joomla site but was moved to the WordPress platform at the beginning of 2009; much of the knowledge Andrew brings to Kilted Chaos comes from spending hundreds if not thousands of hours developing this site.
The site is designed to do three core things:
1/ Make it as easy as possible for the visitor to listen to the music
2/ Encourage the visitor to sign up to the mailing list
3/ Enable the visitor to purchase tracks
When considering the design of the front page we looked at a lot of the top media companies and were ultimately inspired by how http://www.hulu.com/ were able to promote their feature shows by using a sliding image gallery. However, we also wanted to put a streaming audio player and html inside the gallery – something that wasn’t readily available off the shelf – so we had it custom coded. We liked the approach so much that we ended up moving the Kilted Chaos site over to the same style layout.
The music is streamed straight from mp3s using a free plugin – the WordPress Audio Player – it is super simple to use and finally comes with a volume control. We have used many different players over the years, some free, some paid and although the interface on this one is pretty basic, for sheer ease of use, for both site admin and visitor – you can’t beat it.
The site is built using Thesis, a premium wordpress theme that has great SEO and image handling capabilities. Each track is actually a blog post with a full custom title tag, meta description and meta keywords along with tags generated by Tagaroo and images pulled from the creative commons on Flickr – all of which adds to the overall visibility. The mailing list is promoted on almost every page and visitors get something for free by joining. We use the Disqus comments plugin to improve the look and management of visitor comments – other social networks are clearly promoted by icons and one of Andrew’s twitter feeds is pulled into the 2nd sidebar. e-Commerce is provided by MySongStore and is handled offsite, eliminating the need for messy shopping carts, secure certificates and server side storage.
- PLATFORM – WordPress
- Theme - Thesis 1.5.1
- Key Plugins: WordPress Audio Player, Tagaroo (easy tagging), Disqus (enhanced commenting), Google XML Sitemaps (Added “googlejuice”) & Flickr Gallery (Easy images + added SEO)
- Price point of Site: $500
