CollyLogic: Dirty Pretty Things site launch

Dirty Pretty Things site launch

27th February 2006

After a weekend that saw 20,000 members bash the hell out of it, I’m pleased to say that our latest website launch for the about-to-be-massive Dirty Pretty Things seems to have gone well.
The band, fronted by ex-Libertine Carl Barat, recently made their TV debut at the NME Awards, and sold out their first tour in half an hour. It’s all happening at great speed, as did the site build.

It’s been an interesting, rewarding process, working with our existing clients at Creation (who manage the band), artist Hannah Bays (who provided all the source artwork) and record company Vertigo. The folks from the latter’s media department really opened my eyes to how websites are built from the point of mass sales and marketing, and I’ve definitely learned a thing or two about how the record industry works. Our previous work in this sector (The Libertines, Poptones, Thee Unstrung and others) was from a more independent base, so this was a real step up.

Fan-tastic

As usual, the fans come first, and we’ve given them delicious hidden EE forums, internal communication tools, and the ability to upload their own photos, artwork, reviews and wallpaper designs. If you wanna see any of that, you’ll need to join as a member though!

There’s still plenty to do. Some of EE’s looped output causes the odd validation woe, and we can’t guarantee that all content added by the lovely administrators will fall into place perfectly - especially as there is so much to be added, and naturally the forums aren’t perfect (are any?). I’m also a bit concerned about how the site scales once you up the text size by a fair margin. Still, everyone seems happy so far, and I finally discovered the joys of italicised Georgia!

Gimme feedback...

I’m keen to know if any of you spot problems on your computers. There’s some odd positioning stuff going on, and although everything seemed cool through our testing, I guarantee something will go awry somewhere. I also know that due to the speed at which the site was built, I’m bound to have littered the pages with schoolboy errors. Any feedback, both positive and negative, is always welcome.

Simon Collison published this on 27/02/06, at 7:33 PM

Comments

Dirty Pretty Things was a good movie!

Love the website, although on the forums the “forgot password?” link overlaps the page a little (FireFox)

27/02 at 21:07 from Chris Gwynne

Wow. Quite spectacular.

27/02 at 23:41 from Rick

Hi Simon

Great work on the site, as ever!

Noticed this morning that the stylesheet isn’t applying to the gallery page, its just outputting the raw xhtml. It looks like the link in the ‘head’ is referring to a php reference. If this is right, I’d love to know how you worked it out. If its wrong, well no harm done!

Fantastic stuff and it sounds like you had a great experience working on it too.

Congratulations

All the best

Peter

28/02 at 09:05 from Peter Goddard

Blimey, impressive client! I keep hearing them talked about, everywhere! ...And here’s you, producing a sexy web presence for them! Top work. Have you ever seen them live?

01/03 at 01:43 from JamesM

James: Will be seeing them, and hopefully backstage too, at Rescue Rooms (13th March) and Rock City (10th April).

Chris, Peter: Cheers for the feedback - think the galleries are now fixed (it was the PHP ref).

Rick: All down to EE, y’know…

01/03 at 01:57 from Simon Collison

Looks great! The only thing its missing is the free MP3 downloads.

02/03 at 17:08 from Chris Trygstad

Chris: There would be MP3s if they’d recorded any. No releases until 24th April…

02/03 at 17:10 from Colly

Awesome work, as ever. It really fits the band’s style I think. I’m not really a fan of fixed backgrounds - particularly background as detailed as that one - but otherwise, I lvoe it!

What typeface is used in the header, though?

15/03 at 01:38 from Richard

Note that comments are disabled 30 days after articles are published, or sooner if spammers target a particular post. Sorry...