Galapagos4 Blackbook

The Making of a Site

People often ask us for tips on starting or running their own record label, and with the launch of our new website, I figured that sharing the making of the site could be some of the best advice we could offer, to any business. So, here's the process broken down.

Let me preface first by saying that the version of the site you see now is not meant to be the final version. Our Art Director Josh Grotto started us off with the raw design elements of the website and we will also be adding new features to the site in the future. But what I want to cover is the core, logistical side of things, and I think it's an interesting way to tell our story.

Conceptualizing and building the site took just over three years of spare time from Jeff, GB and myself. Lucky for us, GB has access to a beach house in Malibu, so the three of us met up there in February 2006 to sketch out our primary ideas.

We talked about sites that we liked. We talked about our growing digital distribution. We talked about iTunes. We wrote down what we liked about our previous websites and what we wanted the new site to achieve. In the end we put together the first draft of a site map:

Thus began the long and laborious process of building a "back-end" to our site.

This is the part that takes the longest, but is also the most important.

Any content-driven site has a database behind it, and the next task was to design a database to fit our needs.

I'm not going to show you our actual database design, but here is a sample database schema taken from the web. I picked this sample because the database shown is roughly the same size as our database.

Once that was in place, the next step was to build a content management system - a tool to control anything and everything on the site. This is the system we use today:

Building this portion was kind of intense. It required over 100 different PHP scripts and the digitization of our entire music catalog.

Jeff started digging up the masters to all of our releases - including all the 12-inches, 10-inches, and 45s - from the most recent to way back. We even decided to include all the bonus and tour CDs we could find. It was a huge excursion, ripping and uploading each master, tagging and crediting each track. Original cover art files for all the releases also had to be located and uploaded. And we also wanted to integrate links to iTunes for each release.

Halfway through the process, I realized we were basically building an mp3 store - kind of like an underground iTunes, or rather a true viable alternative for Galapagos4 fans. And I had a flashback to when I was putting the first Offwhyte tape together by hand. It was the same feeling - creating a way to put your own music out - but just within a new medium. Of course we have had our music available digitally for years, through other services. But I felt that completing a system to sell our digital music directly, through our own site, straight to the fan, would truly mark the completion of a cycle, and would carry with it the validity of the label coming onto a new plateau.

So when it came to making the "front-end" of our website, we had all of this data well-organized and ready to go.

We paired down our original site map dramatically. We decided that the most efficient way to use the data from our catalog was to make the whole site revolve around the catalog, and to have the catalog be a part of every page. It became more important to find the easiest ways for a user to check out the music that they wanted to check out.

The design of the new site had gone through a number of experimentations. In the end, we decided that a good solution for now was to derive the design from the Galapagos4 10th Anniversary flyer, and use aspects of the original artwork. Jash gave us the Illustrator files and we were off to it.

As stated above, there is much more to come in the future. For now, I hope everyone enjoys the site!