When Dave contacted me to create a new design and structural layout for his site at New Music Nation - I seriously didn’t know what I was getting myself into. Almost two months after that initial contact, I feel like I’ve given birth and handed custody over to Dave with promises to visit often to see how the child grows!…

Every so often, one of those special projects comes my way - - a project that I can really sink my teeth into, get really excited about and experience serious separation issues when it’s all over and 100% handed off to my client. That’s the experience I had with New Music Nation.

First, let me introduce you to the man behind the site. His name is Dave Powers and he reviews music at his new site. Dave is the the former producer of MTV2’s Subterranean, 120 Minutes, Hip Hop’s Toughest Rhymes, Playlistism and more. His site is just full of great music reviews of all types of genres, artists, music labels .. as well as current news coming out of the music industry. If you are a hard core (or even a soft core) music fan, this would be the site for you to visit.

The logo for New Music Nation was created and hand drawn by MTV2’s own Jim Shearer. Jim is a V-Jay for MTV2’s Subterranean by day.. and an extremely talented doodler by night (or is it the other way around?..) Jim provided me with hard (paper) copies of the hand drawn logo in black and white, which they FedEx’d to me. Dave provided me with the specs for the colors he wanted in the logo. I took the logo, scanned it, got out my virtual crayons and went to work. I’m currently in cahoots with Dave to talk Jim into doing this as a freelance side job - - his work is just that good.

The design on this site was just the beginning - and probably the easiest part to complete, compared to the rest of the job that lie ahead of me. New Music Nation is powered by WordPress. I started out the project, on day one, by installing WordPress on Dave’s domain so that he could work at transferring his articles and posts from his previous site. That site was done all in HTML - so there was no easy way to import the articles and posts from that site, except to cut and paste them in. He worked on that part of it, while I worked on the design and logo.

When we were both done with our respective parts, we got on the phone and started plotting our next move. We quickly realized that this was not going to be over anytime soon. New Music Nation has over 1300 categories that Dave had spent time building. 1300 categories, and growing. This brought us to some major decision making about how the site and navigation would be structured. His site is very category driven.

I did a lot of custom coding for this one. First, he has a feature that allows his readers to browse an individual category by month. If you look at his home page you’ll see drop down menus in each of the different sections that allows you to choose to view posts from a specific month, within the category itself. This is not a function that is built into WordPress, nor could I locate a plugin that would allow me to do this easily. So, I rolled up my sleeves and dug into the PHP code for WordPress and built that function in, just for Dave.

Second, is the search by category feature. You can search his site doing it the usual, default way by just typing in a keyword and clicking “GO” - however, you can also type in a keyword - then choose a category in the drop down menu to search for that keyword that exists within posts inside a particular category. Easy you say? Perhaps - however, remember that Dave’s site has 1300 categories. That would make for a HUGE drop down menu, no? Dave pared his choices down and decided he only wanted a few select parent categories to appear inside the drop down menu to allow readers to search within 5 or 6 of the 1300 categories.

Lastly, the big challenge was to create an alphabetical navigation system for his readers to be able to browse his 1300 categories. His structure is something like this:

- Parent Category
- - roughly 850 subcategories

The result? You can view, for example, his Artists Directory. “Artists” being a parent category - - then he has about 850+ subcategories that single out specific artists within the list. We created a subcategory navigation system that would allow the reader to navigate the artists in alphabetical order. We started with a page that loaded ALL 850 subcategory listings.. and ended up with a nice, orderly and clean alphabetical navigation system for the directories.

Whew!

Dave and I ran into quite a few issues in working toward a good solution for this category navigation system for his site. At first, the pages were loading all of the category listings and ended up crashing the site - - or causing his host to give him the dreaded “Your site is temporarily suspended because you’ve used more than 20% of the CPU”. We finally came to an agreement on a solution - and the result is what you see on his site today.

This project was surely a good learning experience for me. Though it is a site that uses WordPress - it certainly is not a site that uses WordPress out of the box. There was a great deal of customization going on - with the design, yes - but a great deal of customization in the code that you don’t necessarily see.. but can surely enjoy when you visit and navigate his site.

So many great things came out of this project. The ability for me to stretch the limitations of my own knowledge and learn a few new tricks is always a positive thing for me. On a personal note, doing Dave’s project kind of reawakened that music fan that exists inside of me — the part of me that’s been ignored due to a hectic and busy lifestyle. I sincerely have to thank Dave for that one. Dave is excited about music . . it’s a passion within him that shines through the work he’s doing on his site today - and it’s contagious! If you have a moment in your day - be sure to give a visit to New Music Nation.. be sure to let Dave know I sent ya!

Tags: Blog Design, WordPress, custom design, wordpress design, music, music reviews, mtv, mtv2, new music nation, PHP,