Tada!
So much for understatement. In any event, Happy New Year! and welcome to the new site. I hope you’ll find it easier to use and more informative.
The Hills Are Alive
First I want to mention the new design. My main goal in this re-design was that the site should better reflect what the music is ‘about’. I get a lot of righteous grief from fans about ‘marketing’; or rather the proper lack thereof. The previous site didn’t do much to give anyone a sense of the music. I think it important that the first impression visitors get will be one that gives them at least some idea what’s in store for them. For whatever reason, the new look feels (at least to me) much more in line with the..er… well, the ‘sound of music.’
When I started doing this, the image of my beloved sea (which figures prominently in so much of my work) kept coming back to me. I can look at it for hours. I thought about my fave ‘prog’ album covers and they always had that look of great space. The Roger Dean stuff in particular always have wonderful backgrounds that fade into a ‘vastness’. That’s part of what I wanted to convey. However, what I do is considerably more intimate. The beach seems the perfect blend—a personal spot that then can lead out to something that goes on forever.
Features
There have been a few things I’ve wanted to add to the site for some time and a new design seemed to fit right in with adding these features. Some are not exactly fleshed out yet, but hey… the year’s just gettin’ started! Anyhoo, here’s a run down on some of the new stuff…
1. I wanted the site to be snappier. I’ve been grousing about the ‘general slowness and over-busy-ness of the web‘ and decided to sort myself out in those departments. My hope is that things will be easier to look at, easier to get to and faster to get there.
2. You can now purchase songs directly from the site from any album page. (You may, of course, still purchase the complete catalog via Amazon and iTunes.)
3. There is a completely new ‘player’ so you can listen to bits of any song from a single page. The old ‘pop up’
player is still available by clicking the ‘suntower’ logo on every page. A double bonus is that the pop up player will now stream full cuts and those cuts will be rotated.
4. There’s a new video gallery function, to go with some new videos. As previously promised, we’ll be cranking out a lot more videos this year—some for artistic purposes and many simply as vehicles to make it easier to check out the tunes.
5. There’s a new holding tank to document my progress on Detroit (The Opera). Detroit is going to be taking up the lion’s share of my creative activity for 2011 and I wanted to have a sort of ‘scrapbook’ where you’ll be able to watch the sausage being made. There will be excerpts of the score, piccies, songs bits and so on. As we now know, it’s all about the content, baby. So I want you to have it all. Take it. Take it! Swallow that content!
Sorry. Anyway, there’s a lot more as well. Surprises on many pages if you just start clicking on things;—something I rather enjoy, by the way.
Should Auld Acquaintance?
OK…I forgot the next line. In any case, many of these changes are based on your feedback and requests. I welcome them even more in the coming year! It’s no secret that 2010 was just about the toughest year in my memory. Hopefully this new site will be just the start of a great new year; a platform for lots and lots of new stuff that you will enjoy.
I’m pretty excited.
