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Tokyo Blade

ExpressionEngine - Jshop - HTML/CSS - Design - Consultation

If you’re old enough to remember the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM) that sprang up in the early 1980’s you may remember these guys. Well, they’re back with a brand new album called “Thousand Men Strong”!

They already had a web site but being based on the Joomla CMS it wasn’t very pretty, taking an age to load up, and code any self respecting web designer would shudder at, such is Joomla! Hence I got a call from my good friend Oliver at http://www.wilsondigital.co.uk/ asking if I could lend a hand with building a new site, but with the catch that the site had to be live in a weeks time to co-incide with the album release! Ever one to take on a challenge I accepted.

ExpressionEngine was the obvious choice for a band site as it needed to manage several types of content, eg news, merchandise sales, gig dates, and various media items such as audio, video and photos.

Luckily we had the new album artwork, created by Andrew Batchelor, that we used as a backdrop. Over a week we put it all together, mainly after normal working hours and with lots of late nights! As we had a free reign with the overall design and presentation this gave me an ideal opportunity to sneak in some odd CSS3 effects such as image transitions which can be seen if you use an up to date web browser (eg not IE8 or older!).

Happily we managed to launch the site the day before the album release, and on the first day the site notched up a healthy amount of new album sales.

We’ll probably still be tweaking a few things in the next few weeks, but we made the deadline, and band spokesman Andy Boulton was dead pleased with it - a happy customer!

Visit Tokyo Blade Some clients manage their own sites so content may have changed from the original.