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Geeky Website Stuff
What?
This is the Smalltown America website V2.0. Our brief is that this will serve as a repository for abosolutely everything STA does. Our ultimate aim is that we can say 'it's all on the website' with complete confidence. We haven't even opened for business yet and already the database is huge. Possibly, we've gone a little bit mental in terms of what we're trying to cover, maybe it's impossible and the liklihood is that it will never really be finished. However, when we're gone this site will serve as a document to all the wonderful music and artists we've been involved with over the years.
Who?
The site and jukebox were designed by the wonderful Helen Turner. Helen is a full-time graphic designer, likes Gorilla Biscuits and letter-pressing. Monkey Illustrations were created (a word that doesn't do them justice) by Matt Littler. Matt can also been seen wearing a cardboard box around central London whilst posing for album sleeves. Dynamic Content and XHTML + CSS were coded by Ben Lancaster, fuelled by caffeine, and very late at night. Ben keeps Cichlids. The original STA website and logo was designed by Kelly Burchell. Kelly enjoys cooking for scores of people at her house in Felpham.
When?
Content population began on April 7th, 2005. The site redesign began at the beginning of that year. Everything took longer than we thought it would, simply because most of this was brand new to all of us. Learning curve... steep... yep!
Why?
Good music needs to be heard; that's the bottom line. This site is here to help you find out about what we consider to be Good Music in the quickest, easiest and slickest way around.How?
The site was developed using industry standard web development and graphics manipulation packages, as well as some lesser known software developed by the Open Source community; such as gPHPedit and Vi(m). Both Ben and Helen work from Apple Macintosh computers running Mac OS X. Ben also uses a Linux machine for development, currently running Redhat Fedora Core 4.
The site runs off a Redhat Linux Enterprise Edition server, running the Apache web server, and scripted using PHP 4. The content is stored and manipulated in a (rather massive) MySQL 4 database.
The markup for this site is (largely valid) XHTML, using pure CSS 1 and 2 for design and layout. The site's designed to work on Internet Explorer 5 and above, Netscape 6 and above, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Safari. This writer's browser-of-choice is Firefox. The bulk of the site is coded in compliance with W3C's WCAG, and Section 508.
The content for this site is managed through a protected web-based interface by a number of completely non-techy people. There job is made nice and easy through a clever interface, and the rather wonderful FCKEditor - it looks nice, but the HTML it produces is a bit messy, so we apologise for that. What are you doing snooping through the source, anyway?
If you want to know more about how this site works or how we've acheived different bits, we'd only be too pleased to answer - just contact us.
I can't believe you've read this far.
Where?
A full list of website resources is available in the site credits section.