Fan-site and email newsletter for a band

A site to provide information for fans of the band: news, upcoming gigs, music downloads, bigographies.

Background

The Mariachis had an existing website when they approached me, but it played a little to much on the Mexican theme, which they wanted to get away from. They wanted the obvious kind of functionality for a fan site: news, upcoming gigs, listen to music, gallery, contact details. The new style needed to look stylish, as well as fit in with the colour scheme of a logo they had had developed elsewhere.

The design

The site was designed to give the feel of an album cover – remove the navigation and it may well have been on a CD near you! The predominant colours of the design are black and orange – taken from the logo. The band had recently had a photo shoot that had given me some really good black and white photos to use to enhance the design. The navigation and modules (news, gigs, mailing list subscription) were layed over the bottom portion of the photo, allowing the full impact of the photo to remain. Once inside the site, the navigation bar jumped up to the top just underneath the logo. This allowed the rest of the screen to be used for displaying the content clearly.

The back-end and administration

Although the design itself could not be altered by the band, they could add and amend the news and gigs, change the photos in the gallery, and update the ‘about’ page. This was done through a custom simple Content Management System which stored the content in a MySQL database. The text and image edits were done using a word processor style text editor, much like using Yahoo! mail or Hotmail.

Keeping the fans informed – an email newsletter

As part of the ongoing project, I then created an email newsletter for the band to send out. It echoed the colouring and styling of the website, but had to be kept simple so that they could edit it without breaking anything, as well as being accessible so as not to be mangled by peoples email programs.