A year in the making...

So, what’s the story behind Anthology? Well to make things clear I need to explain a little bit of the history of my life.

I helped to found the independent record label, Truck Records, as art director, back in 1999, a few short months after a group of my friends had held the inaugural Truck music festival. I was only seventeen years old and the oldest of us had only just started university. We all knew each other from the local music scene around Oxford, England, and the others had originally drafted me in to do all the artwork for the festival. Both Truck festival and the label were (and still are) all about fresh-faced optimism and reflect our belief in doing what we think is right and believing that there are other people out there like us who like what we do and want to come along for the ride.

Fast forward to 2005 and we were desperately in need of a website that could keep up with the pace of change in the music industry, and something that reflected the new attitudes to music distribution and promotion. We were still stuck on a site I had designed in 2001, and it committed such crimes as the use of frames ( David – boo! ) and tables ( David – hiss! ) for page layout. People had learnt how to fiddle with the html on the FTP server so that they could update news, show dates, etc but this inevitably had caused the site to become a bit messy and patchy what with everyone doing things a bit differently and forgetting to close html tags and the like. What we needed was a nice spanking new look to the site (long overdue), married with some sort of back-end system that would mean that the least techie of the Truck staff could easily upload news, dates of shows, downloads, artist press shots, CD pack shots etc. And I wanted it to go further than that.

I envisioned a site that someone could just click a button labelled ‘new artist’, for instance, and they would then just have to upload all the assets for that artist (biog, photos, videos, pack shots etc) and, ‘bam’, there on the site would be all the resources needed for any type of user the website would encounter – from music fans (wanting news, tour dates and downloads) to journalists (needing high quality press shots), to distributors and shop staff needing high quality pack shots.

Not only did I want the site to do that, though, I wanted to say what releases (albums, singles, EPs, downloads) were associated with each artist. So for each release you would need the capability to upload the artwork, track listing, any tracks that would be downloadable or previews, and perhaps other details like the catalogue number, release date and so on.

Now when a visitor ended up on an artist’s page on the Truck Records site they would be presented with a nice picture of the artist, their biography, a list of their latest releases all with little pack shots, their upcoming shows, any available free downloads and watchable videos, there might even be a blog written by the artist if they didn’t maintain their own website.

But not only would the artist section work like this, the front of the label site would need to display the latest news, upcoming shows, latest releases and all sorts of other info to lead visitors further into the site and another important aim of the website was to maximise monetization opportunities through our own shop, with site-wide buy links for releases and merchandise.

The whole site would be serviced by one database containing all of Truck’s assets and would service the artists’ pages, the front page, the releases, tour dates, downloads, and shop sections. Any data uploaded into the database would be used throughout the site to make the site a living, breathing reflection of all the activity of everything Truck was up to behind the scenes. And this could help Truck stand up there with a respectable website on a level with much larger entities while it was run by only one full-time member of staff, but also allow the many spare-time workers and assorted interns to maintain it.

OK, so this all sounds great, right? But how on earth to do this? I had heard of things called Content Management Systems before and I assumed this was the situation they were meant for. So I fired up Google and started searching. I went to sites with names like “A million and one open source CMSs” and poked about with things like Drupal. I also read about things like Zope. I read manuals and forums. It started to dawn on me that you pretty much needed to be a programmer to just be able to get these things installed and running. Past bad experiences with getting basic PHP photo galleries to work didn’t fill me with confidence – and the most programming I have ever done was some Basic on my ZX81 back when I was about nine and some fiddling with HyperCard when my parents bought our first Mac back in 1992. So another problem I had was that the £500 budget I had for the new Truck website wasn’t exactly going to cover a programmer who could sort this out for us, let alone build us a custom CMS.

So, anyway, one day around this time, this guy shows up new in the digital department at my day job. He seemed to be doing a pretty good job so I chatted to him about some artist websites Truck needed doing. A few jobs well-done on, and I posited my problem to him. He seemed pretty interested in the challenge and we started discussing the problems involved in doing it.

The story goes that Archimedes was in the bath when he exclaimed ‘eureka’ after figuring out his displacement theory, then went rushing off into the street, still naked due to his excitement. Well, I was in the shower, and I managed to clothe myself before rushing off anywhere. But my eureka moment wasn’t really that exciting – it just seemed to make sense – in fact I couldn’t believe someone hadn’t thought of it before or wasn’t doing it already…

All the thinking I put into my ‘dream record label website’ led us to believe there must be at least some other people out there with the same needs… and the same problem we had: how to make a dynamic, database-driven website if you were just a lowly web designer or entrepreneur with a great idea but no budget for a programmer?

So here was our new plan: develop a system flexible enough to build almost any type of website with, that almost anyone could use, as simple and as powerful as possible. Another big problem most (if not all) the CMSs, blog systems and assorted other website back-ends exhibit is appalling user interfaces. Programmers ain’t graphic designers, and they certainly ain’t usability experts. They think in functions, “it works, what’s the problem?”. Well the problem is that people who aren’t programmers or computers need to use it and they just want it to work without having to jump through hoops to get it to do what they want.

This is what led us to Anthology.