♠ JackMerlot.com ♠
This site was incredibly fun to make.
Jack Merlot’s music is a strange amalgamation of disparate influences ranging from gypsy-jazz inflected guitar, to elegant and deceptively simple 1950’s-style vocal harmonies, to the powerful boom of the Mingus-influenced basslines.
Click the picture to visit Jack Merlot's website.
The hooks are catchy and hummable, and the lyrics are honest and moving, even if the delivery is sometimes a bit unapologetic. But Jack’s got very little to apologize for, and the site has been a great success.
Go check out Queens Over Aces for a free MP3 download of Jack’s music if you’d like to hear more.
About the Jack Merlot Website
Jack came to us with a laundry-list of ideas and a (relatively) low budget for the project. Since we’ve known him for ages, we decided to accept the project and devote as much time and attention to it as we could. Luckily, the project came in just as the recession was taking its toll on most of our other clients, so we ended up having an exciting and educational way to pass the time while everyone else got their budgets adjusted.
(We didn’t end up charging a lot for the project, but Jack’s happy, and that’s what is important.)
Features Jack Wanted
Jack has been around the web for quite some time, and wanted to build a website to promote and sell his music and other offerings, and had thought a great deal about what he wanted in a site.
His list:
- NO ADS. And especially no pop-up ads.
(It was kind of surprising that he started the list this way. Most people list the thing they want most first; I guess what Jack wants most is, uh, NO ADS.) - A storefront where people could download his albums directly from the artist. (an e-commerce solution, in other words.)
- Archives of past works, including lyrics, tabs, MP3s, and graphics.
- Easy posting of new works, in all the above formats.
- Auto-archiving of new posts.
- A podcast or podcast functionality.
- A way to post Free MP3 Singles of the day/week/month, whatever, for free download.
- A clean, uncluttered, readable design.
- Last.FM functionality, so people could see what he’s been listening to lately.
- Ways for people to sample albums or songs before they buy.
- Any other cool things we could think of – he trusts our judgment. (Haha, sucker! – Mark)
In addition to offering a link to Jack’s podcast, we also decided to dabble with Google Friend Connect on Jack’s site.
In theory, people ought to be able to “join” the site if they have a Gmail account and are logged into it when they visit Jack Merlot.com.
In practice, however, we’ve run into a few obstacles with it, namely, that people are reluctant to join sites unless they have a good reason for doing so. We can understand their reluctance; we, too, have an overabundance of website/username/passwords to remember.
We’re still giving it a try, though.
We also set Jack up with a mailing list through FeedBurner, so people receive posts as emails directly in their inbox whenever a new post is published.
The Feedburner mailing list is working really well, so far. No complaints from Jack, FeedBurner, or ourselves.
We also seamlessly added pictures & links to the sidebar, linking people to the online store, where they can purchase Jack’s albums. The e-commerce section was set up using the Zen Cart e-commerce software, and it’s been working really well.
We had to install an SSL certificate to process credit cards securely, but that wasn’t terribly difficult once we had waded our way through the 250-page instruction manual.
The payment gateway is simple, through PayPal, and works pretty well so far. Paypal deducts fifty cents or so from each album purchase, but that’s ok since Jack still gets around $4.50 of the $5.00.
Another cool feature is the functionality offered by Last.FM, which provides us with a way to automatically show what albums Jack’s been listening to when he’s not busy recording his next album.
It’s super keen to see new albums that we haven’t thought about for a long time appear in the sidebar automatically, and Jack likes it because he thinks that everyone will admire him for his sophisticated taste in music. (*cough*)
In any case, we certainly had a lot of fun installing and configuring all the software that makes the site tick. It’s like a “Clockwork Voicebox”, or so says Jack.
this link is automatically added after each post
One thing Jack really wanted was the ability to promote his Free MP3 Singles of the Day to people on Facebook. We cobbled together some code for this problem and now, whenever a post is made, a “Share This on Facebook” link is automagically added to the post.
So, after Jack is finished posting a new song, he just logs into Facebook, clicks on the Share This link, writes a short little note to his friends, and clicks the button. Voila! Mucho Facebook traffic, and lots of thanks and praises from people looking for new music.
We also added plenty of different ways to navigate through the site, including browsing by Page, by Category, by Recent Posts, Random Posts, and what-have-you.
Jack seems really happy with the site, although we’re not too sure about how much traffic it’s getting yet, but he’s learning Google Analytics now and should have some good feedback pretty soon, as well as some tweaks and tips that will help him lure people into his “shadowy lands.”
Good luck, Jack!
Mark Beihoffer
Chief Technology Officer
Dragonfly Networks
