Corware is proud to announce the deployment of a new artist website, jordanmartin.com, designed from the ground-up with the latest technologies.  This site serves singer-songwriter, Jordan Martin™, as a central portal for all artist content.  Linked extensively with social networking sites Facebook and Twitter, the site also heavily leaverages embedded code from ReverbNation to serve up various artist assets.  Music, video, show schedule, blog, guestbook features are all incorporated into a unified whole using a combination of VS2010 / MVC / Entity Framework / SQL Server.  AJAX & JQuery are used extensively to make the entire site asynchronous.

The new website does quite a number of notable things from a technical standpoint that not only help to deliver a seamless experience for site visitors but also serve the artist's goals:

• The music player (and other 'widgets') are located on the site's Master Page so that they are only loaded once upon site arrival.  The fact that all browsable content is rendered asynchronously means that the user can listen to the music uninterrupted while surfing the site. 
  • So many artist sites refresh the entire page, making listening while browsing to check out the artist incompatible.  It's one or the other, and from personal experience, users don't stick around long when that choice is forced upon them.
  • Using the music player widget (and other widgets) allows the artist to post content to social networking site where credits for song & video plays, fan signups, etc. are accrued.
• Blog content is served up from the artist's WordPress blog almost instantly and in compact form using .NET Syndication and background threading. Loading the blog in the background only once upon application startup and the asynchronous nature of the site mean that persistence between postbacks isn't an issue.  The blog data remains in memory at all times during user's visit so that navigating away from the blog page and then back to it do not cause the code to retrieve the blog data again.
  • The visitor can check out blog content summaries while remaining on the site. 
  • The artist can maintain an easy-to-use off-the-shelf blog without further programming efforts.
  • The programmer was able to deliver just the right functionality with minimal effort.
• The Guestbook feature, on the other hand, was written from scratch to allow for extensibility.
  • The artist can collect feedback and visitor email addresses that might not want to sign up as fans.
  • A future version will allow for site sign-in and authentication to allow the artist to:
    • Approve comments before they appear publicly.
    • Respond automatically or manually via email to a comment's submitter.
    • Possibly automate the submission into an actual fan signup.
• The menu buttons stay highlighted when the corresponding content is rendered.  A professional touch many other sites don't have and reflects the artist's approach to all public content.

While there is room for futher advance of the site, we think it represents a powerful advantage for its client.

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