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.

When we started working with Rough Trade their site was in a pretty sorry state; it was all frame based, with no CMS underpinning it so updates took far to much work – it was in dire need of a complete overhaul. One of the side effects of having such an old site was that their wasn’t really anything for us to work from – no coherent ‘look’ or branding short of the iconic logo, so it was clean-sheet-of-paper time.

We quickly focused in on the key things that are important about Rough Trade – records and artists. It sounds pretty obvious, but with some labels you find focus elsewhere – the label often has a brand and look of its own that transcends the individual artist or record, but this isn’t the case here. To represent the records properly, and to provide some kind of aesthetic bedrock, we decide to use the artwork as large as we could get away with – hence the jQuery based carousel at the top of the page.

To represent artists we had a go at doing something I’ve been itching to do for ages – individually art-worked pages. Each different artist has their own ‘look’ and imagery, and we felt that trying to squeeze that into a generic layout just wouldn’t work for Rough Trade. Hence, each one looks different – check out Antony’s page, Jarvis’ page or Miracle Fortress’ page for a demonstration of what I mean.

Other things I’d like to highlight include the Live dates page, which features a full page background Google Map, and the audio player which features streaming and downloadable MP3s which you can then embed on your site if you want:

Technically this is – as ever – all based on Textpattern, quite admittedly pushing it to the limit and utilising several plugins (including some hand-written ones) as well as a CakePHP-based admin system for looking after Artists (they’re just a little too custom to fit into Textpattern’s normal article-based content). Otherwise I guess it’s all fairly straight forward…