Project Highlights :
Dirt Road Delight is made up of a guitar, fiddle and stand-up bass playing Appalachian Soul. You couldn’t meet a nicer person than Tedi May, the creative force behind the group. Playing Stand up bass, she has pulled together this tight little group. Their fiddle player, Billy Ward is amazing. They were recording their first CD when Tedi came to New Tricks needing a website. We had a meeting or two listening carefully to how…they described themselves and the impression they wanted to impart to their fans, lovingly referred to as the DirtRoadies. Tedi wanted a website that would showcase the band and what they were up to and also a site where their fans could interact with each other and the band. We decided to do that by creating a second site on Ning for the Dirt Roadies.
Tedi had been studying on-line marketing techniques and she had certain items that she wanted on their site. Of course we added a Twitter feed and we also set up a Flickr Site. Flickr is great becasue when you upload photos to Flickr it automatically resizes them to a reasonable size for a website and it makes it easy for people to upload their photos from Flickr to WordPress Galleries and Slideshows. The cross linking from Flickr is also good for search engine ranking. You Tube accounts are also good that way. Tedi has a You Tube account and can easily embed the You Tube code into her posts and pages.
When we set up sites for people we want them to be able to use them and maintain them to some extent by themselves. OF course we have maintenance contracts for people that need some extra help but we want them to be abel to upload photos music and videos with their posts and do so easily so that they keep the site active. Lately I have been disappointed with the music players for WordPress. For the most part they are really hard to customize and a pain to go into the code and put the urls of the mp3s. A trick I use to help people easily add music is to use the music player from a Ning site which is easily customizable and the music can be added by a simple upload feature. When completed the player’s embed code can be copied onto the regular website into a post, a page or a widget for the sidebar. Voila! Even if they are not going to use the Ning site it is a good solution just for the music player.
New Tricks Services:
- Website creation: To keep the costs down we customized, Irresistible, a free theme from Woo Themes.
- Graphics Created a new band logo and a website header. Created background graphics for the customization of the website and the dirtroadies ning site.
- Copy: worked with Tedi May to rewrite existing copy and add additional copy for her blog and about pages.
- Social Media: Started Twitter and Flickr sites and linked them to the blog site.
