IgniteImage.com is a website for my web design company Ignite Image, which specialises in creating stylish, modern, accessible, functional, professional, exciting and standards compliant websites for bands and musicians. I’m extremely proud of both the aims and objectives of this website and company and the website itself.

We are a small team of four at the moment; there is me, responsible for design & development, another excellent developer, a designer & marketeer and an artists relationship manager.

All four of us are closely involved in the independent music scene, with us all being active musicians and regular gig attendants; on a personal note almost every one of my closest friends are members of active bands. Being us so closely involved with unsigned and independent artists as well as being web developers we have had constant requests to create stylish and functional websites for our friends, on a shoe-string of course.

This has given us lots of experience in the common requirements and problems faced by independent artists wanting to create their first online presence and we want to share this knowledge and expertise with other artists outside our circle of musician associates.

We aim to offer the most competitive pricing and feature set without compromising on quality to artists and musicians who wish to create an exciting and modern web site for themselves.

So why not head over to Ignite Image now to learn more, if you think we could help you out or you just want to learn more then don’t hesitate to contact us.

This post is about the launch of second site produced under the Ignite Sounds umbrella, with the first site being for the Leeds band Brody.

The Brody website is mainly static with all the design (including their new logos) and development being performed over a couple of months.

The second site which was launched on the 24th October was for the Leeds band The Downfall. Comparing these two sites is like comparing socks to a tortoise, one keeps your feet warm – the other steals all your lettuce, you can’t really compare the two. This site was created from initial design through to launch in just 4 weeks worth of evenings and weekends with two developers working on it. Over the past 3 weekends alone I spent over 85 hours working on this website and not nearly enough hours sleeping, last Saturday (two days before launch) I worked 25 hours straight.

Looking at the site it does not really appear to be that complex, however once I say that everything was created from scratch and to a high standard I think you can begin to understand where the time went. When starting on the site we’d already begun working on an OO model in PHP for our main site, which is yet to be launched – however we still had plenty of work to do.

After the design was finished 2 intense weeks followed when we finished the model and tied it all together with a web application framework called Mach-II, it was cutting it close but we managed to get everything we wanted in place ready for launch, and at 00:01 on the 24th of October the cron job did it’s work and launched the site while I was getting some well deserved sleep.

All in all it was not the best develoment expirence I’ve ever had, but I cannot lay enough praise on the PHP verison of Mach-II. I have being using Mach-II for Coldfusion in my day job since early 2004 and have being beta-testing the PHP version for since August 2004. My experience with Mach-II during this intense period just proves to me, yet again, how valuable a strong framework and consistant application design and development practices are.

I’m pretty sure we’d have managed to get something out of the door if we’d have being doing it all with old-school procedural code or with some ad-hoc attempt at a framework, but the code wouldn’t have being anywhere near as polished or stable as it is, and I’d probably be sitting here in a couple of weeks banging my head against the monitor trying to figure out what the hell I was doing when I wrote something stupid at 4:00 am in the morning. With the model and design completed all I had to do in these late stages – with such little sleep – was to stitch things together in the controller (Mach-II) which I couldn’t have gone too far wrong with.

Theres still more tweaking to be done and content to be added, but I’m proud of our acheivements in such a short period of time and hope that you like it too.