I’m now about 97% finished rebuilding Blues Brothers Central (www.bluesbrotherscentral.com)
It’s a massive overhaul I began in Feb 2006. The site I’m currently running has existed since 2003, and although I’ve constantly added new content/features and redesigned it several times, it’s essentially the same framework.
The new site is a complete rebuild, everything has been changed, from the logo to the color scheme. Even the URL format has gone from the ugly:
/album.php?album_id=7
to the much more friendly:
/albums/made-in-america/
So, what’s left to do and why haven’t I finished it yet?
Well there’s a couple of incredibly boring data entry tasks I have to finish. One of them was adding all the hundreds of gigs the band has played since the 1970’s, I’ve almost finished these but there are many I won’t bother adding. On the current site people have submitted gigs with useless vague information, like “I think they played in Belgium in 1990, or it could have been 1991″. Because I obviously have the time to waste hours trying to track down when it happened…
Over time more people will submit gigs and this time they’ll be able to be more specific, so if there are any missing then they can be filled in later on anyway.
There’s a MASSIVE picture gallery containing around 1000 photos, these will need to be tagged into the correct categories, however this is something I can ask my members to help with.
I’ve got plenty of products to add to the Blues Brothers Store, and a couple of bootleg albums to add. Plenty of multimedia needs to be uploaded and tagged.
I need to also finish:
- The Blues Brothers Revival page
- Blues Brothers 25th Anniversary page
- Movie Cars (If I don’t finish this I’ll get flooded with annoying emails
I’m also working on a new section that I’m not ready to reveal, mainly because so far I’ve only done the artwork and some basic designs. The programming is only about 5% finished at this stage.
And finally there’s a secret project I’m working on to go with this site, it’s codenamed “Project B12″, it has it’s own separate website. I may launch that along with BB Central v2.0, or I may hold off until the site has stabilized.
A decision I made a while ago was that I won’t be running any banner rotations on Blues Brothers Central. The main reason was that it slowed down the pages, it was another piece of software I had to keep updated, and it wasn’t really getting enough interest. It’s a shame that I won’t be able to promote the websites of my friends and members, but in the end I have to think of the bigger picture. I’ll only be running Google Adsense and Amazon Associates advertising, along with some small promotions for other affiliates I’m involved with.
Finally, here’s some artwork I created but ultimately never ended up using, it was to promote the new site:
That’s a photo I took myself while in Chicago in 2005, I’ve just modified it heavily and added some new signs. I hated it, but it was enough to inspire me to design something 100 times better (and completely different).
Here’s the original:
