Moto Boy (Or how to build a beautiful and functional artist website)
It has become quite easy these days to create functional and beautiful websites with all the different social media services available to artists. One great recent example is the website from Swedish artist Moto Boy, who has managed to combine different accounts from popular services like Flickr, YouTube and SoundCloud in a great way.
The site was created by Martin J. Thörnkvist and Max Adolfsson and here’s what they told us:
Our goal was to make “the best official artist site” around. Of course we decided to use as many existing platforms as possible. Soundcloud was the obvious choice for music. To me music should be the central (might seem obvious but if you look around at artist sites it’s not) part of the site. I’m really happy by the way the Soundcloud platform solved a handful of problems fort. Storage and data traffic is taken care of and the player is highly customizable enabling us to upload the music once and present it in different ways across the site.
Last year, Martin also wrote a great blog post titled “Revival Of The Official Artist Website” that I highly recommend reading if you’re currently considering to (re)build your own website.
Let’s have a closer look.
Site hosting:
The site is powered by publishing platform WordPress and self-hosted on the own domain motoboy.se with a customized design template. It’s free to use.
Start page:
In the top right screenshot, you can see that the start page combines different services structured in three columns:
- Left column: the news items are posted as blog posts via WordPress, some include YouTube and Vimeo embeds. Makes it easy to go into the WordPress Dashboard, write a quick post and it jumps to the top of the news section when you hit publish.
- Middle column: the SoundCloud waveform player, a Facebook Fan box, latest pictures on Flickr and a newsletter sign up box.
- Right column: the tour dates each link to an individual overview page where they integrated the great cross-platform commenting tool Disqus. See the most recent comments and Twitter blurbs in the right column.
The Music page:
Click ‘Music‘ in the top menu it’ll bring you to Moto Boy’s discography where you can choose the album you’d like to check out. The screenshot below is the overview page for his most recent album Lost In The Call where you can either choose to play the full album in the artwork set player, watch the music video or jump straight to an individual track page with the waveform player, lyrics and credits.
The Gallery page:
The Gallery is a collection of recent picture sets pulled from photo hosting service Flickr. Click on a photo and you’ll first get a dynamic preview and if you want you can click-through to the individual photo page on Flickr.
The Shop page:
Moto Boy makes it easy to purchase his stuff. Either hit the link to iTunes or buy his albums and merchandise straight from the site’s own shop – powered by the WordPress Shop Plugin. You’re able to select either downloads, cds or vinyl records. Payments are possible with all major credit cards and are processed by PayPal.
Make sure to click-through to check the site out for yourself and we hope this post could give you some inspiration if you too are currently working or thinking about using a bouquet of highly useful services for your own artist website.
What’s your experience? Any suggestions? Post a comment below and let everyone know.