David Emery Online

I don't really do web design so much any more - I firmly have a marketing hat on these days (and it's a pretty snazzy hat, let me tell you...).

Below is an archive of previous sites I've worked on.

We’ve just put the finishing touches to the new site for upcoming solo artist Kid Harpoon. This one is a bit different then most of the sites we do for two main reasons: firstly, the whole site is locked out to almost everybody. The only way in is by having a code, which are printed on wristbands given away at gigs.

The whole reasoning behind this is that Tom, who is Kid Harpoon, wants to use the site as I way of properly interacting with his fans be posting up demos, new songs etc – not something everyone should see, only the true fans that have gone to see him.

The second big difference is that instead of being based on Textpattern, are normal CMS choice, it uses ExpressionEngine as we needed something that has advanced user management. I’ll be honest, I’ve not been particularly impressed with it – it seems over complicated, with a huge amount of table-based templates you need to customise and a not-brilliantly-thought-out UI. It’s a real shame, as the feature list is very good, but I don’t think we’ll use it again – the search for a good CMS that handles simple social network style features continues…

Again, design and thinking down to me, coding and frustrating template customisation by someone else (who still hasn’t got a blog to link to).