East of Shirley
This project involved building a new website for East of Shirley, a Boston-area indie folk/rock band headed up by TintypesDigital’s co-founder Michael Clark.
The primary goal of this effort was simple enough: to deliver a site that put the band’s music front and center. In our view, band websites often do a poor job of accomplishing this. One often has to go hunting for the actual music, or one finds only snippets of songs to listen to. Oftentimes, on band websites, flashy production values often trump the content itself. ”East of Shirley” wanted a site that was well-styled, to be sure, and reflective of the band’s musical aesthetic, but that made its music the main focus.
The resulting site attempts to accomplish this. It does so by creating a simple to navigate overall structure, in which an iPod-like music player sits in the sidebar of each page on the site (in exactly the same location on each page), allowing visitors to listen to a catalog of the band’s music while perusing the content on the various site pages. The Flash-based music player is simple and intuitive to operate, and it allows the band the flexibility of updating the player with new material whenever they so wish. The site maintains a highly consistent and somewhat unique visual “look and feel,” as well, by leveraging a TintypesDigital-developed, antique-looking map of the Hindu Kush region as its background, with a Sanskrit-like typeface for the titles. Each page supports an area of unique content, while at the same time providing a consistent set of navigation menus and the ubiquitous music player.
This site was hand-coded using (X)HTML, CSS, Javascript, and jQuery. In terms of its technical implementation, it leverages “server-side includes (SSI)” to deliver static content, uses CGI-based email forms, has an eCommerce feature, and provides access to both an image gallery and streaming video via various Flash-based strategies. The site was first delivered on a Linux-based development host, but was subsequently moved to a Windows-based production system, in order to meet the requirements of a new service provider.
