Shadow Circus Official Band Website

New York-based progressive rock band Shadow Circus wanted to do something more ambitious than the sort of Flash websites typical among modern band websites. The band wanted to employ forward-thinking promotional strategies, and be able to achieve a highly interactive relationship with their fans.

Shadowcircusmusic.com is a Codeigniter-based, content-driven site, with some interesting twists. A widget pulls in recent posts live from Twitter.com, so homepage content is always fresh and up-to-date with the group's latest announcements. A streaming media player widget connects to their ReverbNation account, so they can provide high-quality streaming audio, and gain detailed statistics about listeners. The widget can also be shared by anyone who visits the site, and content can be updated by the band "in the wild", opening up endless possibilities for viral distribution.

New fans are rewarded with a free song after signing up for the newsletter (driven by phpList), and both compact discs and high-quality digital downloads are sold through a simple e-commerce solution utilizing the open-source ZenCart.

A custom logging engine has been built into every page on the site, providing real-time statistics of any new referrals, quickly signaling availability of media mentions, reviews, and forum posts which the band can then re-post, respond to, or simply help foster a spark of interest from particular sources.

Technologies Used: Codeigniter, PHP, mySQL, phpList, ZenCart, Twitter API, Facebook API, Myspace API