Disclaimer: If you do not live/work in the Greater Toronto Metro Area - DO NOT respond to this ad. We will NOT hire foreign website developers & want to be able to meet our prospective candidates face-to-face. Also, please DO NOT respond to this ad if you cannot effectively manage and organize 2 website projects at once. We would prefer to hire someone that works or lives in the Bathurst/Davenport/St. Clair area of Toronto. Job Detail: I urgently require a website developer to work on 2 separate projects. One project is a total ground-up reconstruction of http://www.playrecords.net The second is an aesthetic update & introduction of e-commerce/blog functionality to http://www.lisa-brown.com A budget for each project has not been set, so please do not ask for budget ranges. I will talk to each developer that indicates interest, meet, and go from there. You WILL be compensated in CAN$. The Lisa Brown project site will likely take a little less time to complete, as I don’t believe that it necessarily requires a total rebuild. The incorporation of e-commerce functionality is likely to be the most time consuming part of this particular project. Blog functionality is important here too - whatever CMS is used needs to be very user friendly as the caretaker/webmaster of the site has limited HTML and web experience. I will be a contact point for this project, but the developer we hire will have to liaison and spend a significant amount of time with a different contact for important and specific details of this project. Now, a little about the http://www.playrecords.net project (which I am heading): We have already designed in Photoshop what we envision the new portal will look like. We are looking for someone who is extremely proficient in HTML/CSS and back-end (eg. PHP) programming to turn our vision into a slick clean fast website. Basic structure: Home News The Label Artists Releases Tour Dates Audio Video Contact Mailing List General q&a with previous prospective developer to give you a general idea what we’re looking for & what weve talked about: 1. want it to be easier for producers to get us music self-managed drop box DEVELOPER: How did you want this to work? It sounds like you can just use an FTP account (or multiple accounts if you want one for each producer) to do this. Is it just allowing them to send you large music files? I’d suggest FTP over creating a web interface if the files are really large (wav files, etc.). We can build something though as a web page to allow for this too happen as well if you’d prefer not to use FTP just in case some producers aren’t familiar with FTP programs and using them. Either way, can you explain how you’d want this to work. Will each producer have their own login? Will they just be able to upload files to you? Or will they be able to download anything as well in the same folder? Do they need to see what they’ve uploaded that’s currently there? Or is it more just to send you files instead of sending them in emails? Do you want them or yourselves to be able to comment on files that are there? Etc… We can look into building something along with the site, or even to see if there’s any 3rd party applications out there that you could use. PLAY RECORDS: We would like to eventually build a fully functional ('login-able' perhaps) producer/wanna-be-producer interface where we can have them upload tracks and create their own metadata for each track (and collect other additional info like location, email addy, etc.). A big problem we have is managing the amount of mp3s & wavs (demos) that come in without being properly ID3 tagged or accompanied by info that gives us an idea where the hell it's from etc. This would probably be a project for the future, as it probably would significantly increase our cost on this quote. I would however, love for a feature like this to be able to be built into our website in the future if we choose to make further improvements. We currently use a variety of methods when receiving tracks - we use our current FTP fairly often to distribute WAVs and mp3s & find that most producers are fairly up on their FTP - so lets sit tight on this one... 2. improve artist promotion DEVELOPER: What pages/features would you be looking to include to do this? Besides having a strong website (both a good design and current content), you want to make sure you utilize key information pages, like news and tour dates to keep those up to date for visitors to see. Also, the mailing list is a good way to communicate with the fans. PLAY RECORDS: We currently use a lyris server for our mailing list. I will be active on artist pages and news/tour dates/release dates and keep that info as current as I can. I am fairly up on my HTML, but would like for some the core functionality to be able to be updated by people other than myself or our webguy. 3. video and audio player in-house DEVELOPER: We can build both of these. Would you want the video player then to use videos you upload to the site yourself? Or would you want to utilize YouTube to upload the videos there and then just embed the player into your site? That saves some development time and cost on your end and also makes your videos available to be virally spread on YouTube. We can build a custom Flash video player though as well. With that you’ll need to upload your video files in a particular format (FLV video), but we can provide the settings to use there. You’d need a version of Flash (not the player, but the program itself) to export the videos. I believe there’s some other cheaper programs you can get to export to FLV. We just use Flash as we have the program itself. PLAY RECORDS: This is something that we have to discuss amongst ourselves further. I agree that we can use Vimeo or Youtube to post our vids and link them into the site... This would save us dev. money. We don't necessarily need our own video player. We would like definitely have our own audio player though. 4. website tracking and stats need to be easier to look at DEVELOPER: With your web host you should have some stats you can see, but instead of that (well, in addition to that) you should set up a Google Analytics account for your site. You just sign up (http://www.google.com/analytics/) and they give you code to put onto your site. Their stats are pretty detailed and visually easy to view. PLAY RECORDS: We just set one up and I inserted some code on our existing code. I would like to have tracking on buttons (eg audio player) on the site etc - its easier if you guys set that up as you write the site (I'd have to provide you with the specific tracking code I guess)... I can put the analytic stuff for each page though no problems if that'll save us on billable hours. 5. recommended artists 1. as people browse our new artist section we’d like to recommend other play records’ artists that are similar DEVELOPER: That’s no problem. That would just be some links on the artist page to other artist pages on your site. Make sure to mention things like this when providing the site details. PLAY RECORDS: Ok. Great. 6. upcoming releases need to be up DEVELOPER: This would be content managed so you can easily update this. There would be a “Releases” page which can list current and upcoming releases (if you want, or just current on this page, or whatever you prefer) and we’d also feature some upcoming and recent releases on the “Home” page. Typically the home page will act as the front page of a newspaper and not just have news on it. We’d feature key content from parts of the site, so recent news, upcoming tour dates, recent/upcoming releases… even things like a “featured artist” which can randomly pull in one of your artists each time the page is loaded. We could/would include a general promo area as well where you could upload an image (with link) to promote anything else that’s happening at the moment… Like a new video, tour, album release, etc. PLAY RECORDS: This sounds great. I am going to send you a mockup of our design so far. 7. performances/tours/future stuff need to be up DEVELOPER: This would be content managed as well. Just let us know what fields/info you’d want to include with each date and any specific functionality. Typically with label sites it would just be a list for each artist (table format) of the upcoming dates (date, city/state/prov, venue, buy ticket link if there’s a play to buy tickets somewhere, event info, etc.). PLAY RECORDS: Again, this sounds awesome... I'm huge on content management and organization! 8. separate the portal using colour dots or small icons indicating what artist has produced for what sub-label DEVELOPER: Not sure what this means. You’ll have to explain it more in the context of the rest of the site and what you need done. PLAY RECORDS: There is Play Records then sub-labels Play Digital/Yalp Records/Play Deep... A big thing for our VP was to have each artist and track sorted in the database by sub-label and represented on the page with colours that are associated with the sub-label the track is released on. I hope I’ve given you some idea of what we’re looking for in a developer. Please contact me as soon as you can and we can set up a meeting. Include your phone number in your reply. I look forward to your response! Cheers, Play Records/Lisa Brown project
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