Signet Mae’s web presence – Post 1: How we are using Wordpress

It’s a great time to be in a band.

The music industry is shape-shifting by the day. New and interesting innovations are springing up all the time. And the big winner? The fan. Just look at the recently released Nine Inch Nails iPhone App. Trent Reznor (the mastermind behind Nine Inch Nails), it would not be too much to say, is quite possibly the perfect example of how to be a musician in the 21st century. The aforementioned application offers NIN fans many innovative features:

• Location-based conversation and photo sharing with other NIN fans internationally
• All the latest NIN news and blog updates
• Streaming music, including exclusive playlists and thousands of fan remixes
• View, save and share images from NIN’s fan media archive
• Free iPhone and iPod Touch wallpaper
• Direct access to NIN forums
• Personalised fan login
• Private messaging and customisable user profiles

Did I mention it’s all free?

That’s exactly how it should be done. And it’s the same with NIN’s music. Do you think Trent Reznor loses any fans for offering so much for free? Of course not. His success is long-standing, forever-growing, and sustainable. He’ll make his millions because his fans are loyal, gracious, and committed.

That’s why, as one of our very first decisions regarding the release of our EP, we decided it should be made available via free digital download. And with the help of our vast online network, we exceeded all expectations with the sheer amount and international spread of downloads, and even managed to bust our bandwidth.

So, what are we doing to spread the Signet Mae love online? Following is a series of posts about what we are doing to enhance Signet Mae’s web presence, starting with our website.

Our website
By night I might play bass guitar and piano with the band, but by day I get paid to be a communication designer in Melbourne-based design agency. We’d had a web presence as a band for a good couple of years, but through talking with the boys, we got excited about what could be done with some of the brilliant open-source alternatives for building an interactive and content-rich website.

Wordpress was the favourite from the start. Traditionally, Wordpress has always been a blog-based content management system, but this proved to be perfect for a band wanting to maintain a personal and active up-to-date website. The other beauty of Wordpress is the development community. There are literally thousands of plug-ins and themes available to extend your functionality in any way you’d want to.

To start with Wordpress, check out Wordpress.org and have a bit of a read. Wordpress.org is the DIY, open-source version of Wordpress, the other implementation being via Wordpress.com. The difference is that the “.org” version of Wordpress can be developed upon in a free and open development community with full freedom for hacking the look-and-feel and functionality of your site, with the “.com” version being more of an online tool with a limited set of options for hacking your site, more suited standard blogging. The catch is that with the “.org” version – the one we use – you have to have a pretty good knowledge of maintaining a web server, setting up a CMS database, and coding websites. For more info on the differences, read this article.

So, I’m speaking about all these cool things you can do… so what have we done?

The look and feel of our site was designed by myself, and is based upon the very popular Thematic Wordpress Theme Framework. My tools? A combination of physical and digital. The artwork contains original photography and ink drawings, combined with some free textures I downloaded, put together in PhotoShop. For the web coding, I like it simple, so I use a basic but very usable free coding text editor called Smultron. For transferring all our files between my Mac and our server, I use the popular Transmit FTP Application. If you’d like any more detail about what I used to build the site, feel free to email me. And for those out there that aren’t that keen on the idea of having to code any design on the site, there are thousands of quality templates available for you to use.

Here’s a summary of some of the plug-ins (in alphabetical order) we’re using behind SignetMae.com…

• Category Show – allows us to have this “Thoughts” section on the site. We’ve set it so that we can post our “Thoughts” to a category that matches our name (i.e. this post is under the category “Adam”). This means all our thoughts can be kept in one location, our “Thoughts” page.
• cforms – a brilliant plug-in that powers all of our forms on the site. We use the plug-in on our EP download page, our user image and user video upload sections, and our page for our new “Found” competition.
• eShop for Wordpress – the plug-in behind the Signet Mae store, links directly to your PayPal account and allows you to set shipping prices and variable shipping zones.
• Gigs Calendar – the brilliant plug-in for managing our gigs calendar. Includes the ability to show Google Maps of venue locations, link to online ticket sales, and maintain a list of previous shows, all from simply making a new post.
• Google Analytics for Wordpress – This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics with extra search engines and automatic clickout and download tracking to your WordPress blog.
• NextGEN Gallery – the plug-in behind our image gallery. Allows a javascript lightbox and is very easy to manage.
• Sociable – allows links to popular social media news sharing website. Those little buttons you see under this post are powered by Sociable. Great for getting your news spread around the world.
• Subscribe Sidebar – this plug-in gives you the little subscribe links we’ve placed at the bottom of our sidebar. These allow users to subscribe to our news feeds in ways that suit them

Combine all this with a good knowledge of design, HTML, and CSS, and some basic PHP hacking and you’ve got the Signet Mae website.

This concludes our first post giving you a bit of an insight into what we’re doing to bring Signet Mae to the online world. Next week we’ll be covering how we utilise social media for the band.

And in case you were wondering, yup, I am planning on making a Signet Mae iPhone application one day… But we’ve got a little way to go yet

Hope you got something useful from the post.

:: Adam