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
Website for “under the rose”
Today I designed and donated a simple website to launch under the rose, an album featuring master oud player Rajim AlHaj and nouveau flamenco pioneer Ottmar Liebert. The musicians who recorded this album are giving it away for free in support of Direct Aid Iraq.
Click above to listen to under the rose
Ottmar Liebert’s Redesign
The last time I did a complete redesign for platinum-selling flamenco guitarist Ottmar Liebert was in 1995. By 2008, he was ready for something new and fresh, something that pushed the envelope while staying rooted with his zen-sensibility for elegant, clean, functional design.
The jewel of this redesign is a environmentally sensitive home page which, if left alone for 10 minutes, gets devoured by weeds, vines, bugs…
This fairly huge project included:
- SEO-friendly flash
- A wordpress diary that goes back 12 years
- A record label
- An MP3 downloads shopping cart.
http://ottmarliebert.com
Ottmar’s “Scent of Light”
Long-time client and friend Ottmar Liebert just released a beautiful new album of guitar music. It hits stores next week, but the music can be previewed and downloaded as of today from the ListeningLounge — a custom-built mp3 store I set up for him a couple of years ago.
Each of these ten instrumentals draws a picture, and each picture tells a story. It’s music as a smell that triggers unexpected memories. India, 1978… Granada, 1992… each track has a strong atmosphere of time and place, like the journal of an itinerant poet or painter.