Music for Scotland

After the success of the Seattle Wedding Band website, Richard and Steve approached 45b to develop the idea further.

The website for the Scottish wedding band, Seattle was one of 45b's earliest jobs.  It was a quick little job, on a small budget, to give them a unique identity among a competitive field. They were happy with the site (http://www.seattleweddingband.co.uk/), and then decided to spend a bit of time and money on some online marketing. 

45b suggested partners Web Sense (http://www.web-sense.co.uk/) and this is where things really started to take off.  Jim at Web Sense did some keyword research, and suggested some alterations to the site content.  He then embarked on a PPC campaign (pay per click, such as Google Adwords) as well as doing some link building.  Before long, the hits to the site were increasing and Seattle found themselves in the enviable position of being booked solid for over a year in advance. 

Finding themselves turning down bookings on a regular basis, they came to 45b with the idea of creating an online agency, called Music for Scotland (big name, big ideas!) to handle the increasing amount of booking requests they were receiving.  After an informal chat, coffee, and a few fun-size snickers, we had formulated the plan for the Music for Scotland website. 

This would require a bespoke content management system, to allow them to add artists to the roster.  It was important that the users could hear music samples of each act.  And they wanted the flexibility to group the acts under various categories, to allow for easy future expansion.  In addition to that, they wanted new acts to be able to apply online for inclusion.  In order to make the process as simple as possible for the user, it was decided that an automatic "shortlist" should be created - as the user browsed the site, if they heard an artist they liked the sound of, they could click a button to add this act to their shortlist.  Once the list was complete, it would just be a case of filling out the booking request, and this would be emailed to Music for Scotland, with the user's shortlist embedded into the email. 

The proposal and quote were accepted, and 45b set to work on the functional specification and designs. Richard and Steve had very specific ideas regarding the look they were after, and after several rounds of design alterations they were both happy.  At last we could move onto the build and programming.   

The technical side of the build went smoothly. XHTML & CSS templates were created and tested, then the site was built using ASP.NET 2.0 and an MS SQL database.  All worked well, a help document was written up, and Steve was taken through the workings of the CMS in a couple of hours. 

He's now happily adding artists on a regular basis, and more importantly, taking bookings on a daily basis.

The client's view

Visit the website: http://www.musicforscotland.co.uk/

If you'd like help getting your business idea off the ground, please get in touch for an informal chat.