ChasingLilly.net

I told you guys I have a few things lined up to do this summer. The next thing lined up is band-related.

Yes, you all know about Violent Blue. But did you know we now have our own website? Chances are you didn’t, so go check it out at violentblue.net. Having your own website is a big step for bands in today’s digital generation. Thus while the band itself is a big project, another big project for me will be creating/updating the site. Will and I agreed it would be great if each member of the band had his own blog, so I got Will set up with one of his own at violentblue.net/willmccarry. You may notice he only has one short post up, so go comment on and yell at him to start updating it more!

Right now the site is up and functional, though it looks terrible. It was just a custom page I threw together in an hour or two using a [terrible] CMS called concrete5. For now, it’s passable. It has a video of our single, and is also running the RSS feeds of our three blogs under our epic pictures. It’s also running a feed of our latest Tweets, and I’m going to put a box linking to our Facebook Fan Page. So it does work in terms of being a sort-of HUB for our future fans to be socially in touch with us. But don’t worry, the look of the page won’t stay white, weird, and boring for very long. Like I said, concrete5 is, while easy to use and great for beginners, nearly impossible to personalize. So for this site I’m moving away from it, and any other CMS for that reason.

I tested numerous others such as Drupal and Joomla, too. While many people I know use content management systems like concrete5 and Drupal effectively, it just isn’t what I’m going for with the site, even if I wanted to take a more community-driven approach. However, I don’t want to use services like WordPress or Blogger for a home page. While I could even strip a theme down so it has a more basic homepage, I don’t like the non-static feel or annoyingness of blog-driven band pages.

So basically the whole point of all the above writing is to explain why I’ve chosen to build the site from the ground-up by myself and code a crisp, clean, CSS template from scratch. This will be quite a learning experience for me, and I don’t want any of you “smarter” web developers laughing at me as I crawl and cry my way to a cool looking site. Obviously I won’t post the site until it’s completely done, but I will keep updating the process on this blog as it comes along. So it looks like this is the only place you’re gonna get that info which… you probably don’t actually care about. Hahah no matter, I’m the one running this blog, so I decide what gets put up, even if it’s boring and loser-filled.

Happy Trails,

Sam.