Wordpress + Sweetcron + Sass on Slicehost

The new Wizkid Sound website is now live, and I wanted to give a brief overview of what’s powering it. We’ve moved the site from Dreamhost to a slice on Slicehost. Dreamhost is great (I still have several sites hosted there) but I wanted a bit more control.

The site itself is a blend of Wordpress, Sweetcron, and some plain old PHP, all styled by Compass-generated Sass and Blueprint. Eyes glazed over yet? Read one of Dan’s posts . We’re still using Wordpress for blog posts, but we’ve started using Sweetcron to aggregate all of our Twitter and Youtube activity. Any time either of us posts something, it shows up on the Sweetcron feed (under The Feed). The advantage of Sweetcron is the ability to aggregate multiple sources (i.e. Twitter, Youtube, Vimeo, other RSS feeds, etc.) and theme it like the rest of your site.

Sass and Blueprint provide the clean layout of the site. Thanks to Zach at WeTheCitizens for recommending I check out Sass. I won’t go into depth about it, but it’s worth checking out if you’re into CSS (or fed up with it, for that matter). It’s an alternative to coding straight CSS, and a pleasure to work with.

As for the design, I wanted something ultra-clean. Most recording studios have very old-fashioned sites, as in, 1998-style. They list previous clients and have huge gear lists, and maybe some photos of the studio. That never really interested me as a musician…I’m not going to wade through the client list to find someone I recognize, and I’m probably more interested in hearing some samples of the work the studio has done. Blog posts and Twitter updates give a feel for what we do as a studio, and the music player takes care of the rest.  I got the photo of the red speaker from Fotolia, a stock images site, along with a few other images that I tried out in various designs before I settled on the grey, red, and white theme after seeing part of The Hostel 2 and being too afraid to do any more design work.

The music player we had previously used was Bandcamp’s, but they didn’t have a design that fit particularly well with the design I had come up with. If they do come up with customizable designs in the future, I will definitely switch back. For now, I’ve implemented Boutell’s XSPF Player, which is the standard XSPF player with an auto-resume feature that keeps the music playing when the user switches pages. This can be accomplished easily using iframes (and there’s no gap in music) but iframes suck. So XSPF auto-resume it is.

In Summary: Wizkid Sound = Wordpress + Sweetcron + Sass on Slicehost.

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