Website & blog redesign for Round Mountain
Round Mountain is a “Two man singing folk orchestra” based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. When musicians Char and Robby Rothschild received a last-minute invitation to play at the Folk Alliance conference in Memphis, they asked me for an emergency meeting to see if it would be possible to build them a brand new website in short order. The website you see below was designed and built in 10 hours using “The Station” WordPress theme as a starting point.
Highlights from this marathon design session included:
- Creating the two minute promotional video featured on the home page
Because a good video is essential for promoting a band - Automatically importing over six years of blog posts from blogger.com
Because splitting your content across 2 sites hurts your Google ranking - Promoting Facebook and newsletter signups (via iContact)
Because having a website is not enough: you need to ‘push’ your news to your audience because they may not return to your website on their own
www.RoundMountainMusic.com
Prototyping for PayPal
I really enjoy doing rapid prototyping, and from a business perspective there’s no better way to figure out how to bring a new product to market. This month, AnswerLab (San Francisco) hired me to produce web prototypes to test a new financial product for PayPal.
Here’s how this type of study works:
- Figure out what different messages or images you think might help to sell your product
- Produce a prototype (fake) website that simulates purchasing that product, with variations for each message or image you want to test
- Send users to test out each variant of the website
- Conduct statistical analysis of users’ browsing behaviors to figure out which variation produced the best results