Honkey tonker Grant Langston’s new website went live today, in preparation for his sixth album release. From a design standpoint, we created a straightforward, easily navigable look with some touches of country flair, placed in a color scheme that hints at old leather. The focal points are two big worn boots that appear on every page, mirroring Grant’s larger than life musical personality and real, no gimmicks songs and performances.

This is a fully featured WordPress-based music website, modern and webby in every way. It is built on the basic WordPress blogging system, but heavily hacked to allow Grant to use the administration area as a full blown content management system. Every aspect of the site is built in templates, so he can update everything easily from pictures to text to photos to calendar dates to video with no programming or coding, and no risk to damaging any page accidentally.

The home page includes a music player on the front page streaming 5 new songs, as well as automatic information streams showing his next three upcoming gigs and latest news posts. Inside, there is a calendar section that gives readers full access to information, maps, and prices, as well as an automatic gig archive that captures all past gigs. The photo section allows Grant to upload sets of photos easily and let readers view them in a high quality flash viewbox as slideshows or individual pics with captions. A news section has news about the band, a separate blog for Grant’s random thoughts, and press reviews.

In the music section, there is a full flash player with every tune he has recorded available for listening. Individual album song titles, art, and album notes are right there, and we added an ecommerce system so fans can download high quality versions of each record complete with artwork — and every penny goes to the band. Of course, links to the usual iTunes and CDBaby stores are also available too.

Best of all, the news and gig calendar sections feed into two separate RSS feeds, so fans can subscribe to them and receive updates in their email or in their bookmark bar in their browser as soon as they happen. There is also a nice comment system that allows users to discuss and respond to Grant’s posts, all of which is overseen by a robust spam protection and administrator monitoring system.

And, last but not least, a special plugin that allows Grant to adjust the meta data on any page quick and easy so it is optimized for search engines.

Tags: music