In March 2013, I was approached by the talented singer-songwriter Millia Oz to craft her website. Being a musician at an early stage of her career with barely any promotion material apart from her music, we quickly agreed that the website had to behave as a central marketing hub. Therefore, it had to be simple, easy to use and enjoyable to help promote herself and her music as much as possible.
To help Millia to get a good exposure, her responsive website features snippets of news, upcoming gigs and a custom music player (pulling in her repertoire from SoundCloud). As well as marketing materials such as a photo gallery, biography and press kits.
After the launch, the website got featured in various music related blogs and helped the artist gathering more media attention and gig invitations in the UK, Holland and Portugal.
Despite this initial traction, Millia Oz later paused her musical career to focus on a secondary path of her professional career. But I’m sure sooner or later she will be back.
As this project ran on a shoestring, I tackled most of the tasks to bring it to life. Starting with photography, writing content and promotional material, the UX and UI design, moving on to building the backend and finally the frontend of the website.
Feedback
I absolutely enjoyed working with João. I had never worked on a similar project before, so I had to trust him entirely. And I’m glad I did, as the final result is amazing. Even in the photo shoot we did was quite a pleasant experience. I hope we can collaborate again in a near future.
Technical
The website was built in HTML5 using the browser’s History API and LocalStorage to cache and speed up page navigation as well as CSS3 transitions to enhance the experience. This sits on a vanilla Javascript MVC based app connecting the frontend to third-party APIs (SoundCloud, Youtube and MailChimp) and a custom PHP backend API for content management. Even though the frontend was dynamic and Javascript based, the backend enables search engines to index the content plus outputting it to RSS feeds to further allow content syndication.