- The New Site is here »
About once a year i take a good long look at my website and soon decide that i'm ready to overhaul it and give it a new design. I've been doing this for about 4 years now, each time experimenting with different, but similar layouts, design elements and various other bits. This time around i realized that my designs were never really very representative of the most important thing on here: Music. Having grungy textures and links to your favorite sites and merchandise is one thing, but i really wanted to represent music and how it influences me, not that i'm a website designer. So i started doing some research, looking at various different websites out there and was inspired by sites that used photography to communicate their message. Photography is a hobby of mine and i don't consider myself an expert at it.
But, experimentation is in my nature so i used that approach to start taking pictures of the various musical "elements", if you will, around me and in the studio. I spent about a week doing that and the result of that are the backgrounds and wallpapers found on this site. The design for the site pretty much came together on its own after that and the rest was just a matter of putting together all of the code and javascript.
On the technical side of things, the site now uses the Pods CMS plugin for the discography, events and bluecast. Previously i had to trick WordPress into doing it all via posts, but that ended in disaster with the discography and various other sections of the site going kaputt. Once i have the code more refined and cleaned up, i'll make the Pods import package available on the Pods website. I wanted to thank Scott Clark (aka SoftCharisma) for his help with this as well.
So what's new with the site? Things are a lot simpler to promote user friendliness, ergo why the homepage no longer has all of those banners and what not. There are now more freebies available, both music and wallpapers. I'll be adding to those as time passes. The discography now actually works and has been simplified and the Bluecast has its own section as well. Older episodes of both the Bluecast and Blue Industries, as well as any other guestmixes i've done are available on hybridized.org. I've also developed a mobile version of the site for iPhone / Android users since the site like this is not very mobile browser friendly. My goal for the next year is also to blog a little more and not just have it be useless blabber, but perhaps try to share with you some of my crazy exploits in the studio and post tips and tricks regarding music production and sound design. I'm always up for hearing feedback from anyone, so if you like, send me a message or leave a comment and let me know your thoughts on the site or anything else you'd like to talk about. I am still working out some bugs on this site, so if you find anything, let me know.-
Date:
December 24, 2009
Posted in:
News
Tags:
freebies, new website, photography
3 Comments »
