Horsham rocks website launch
On: 6th November 2018
Lightscale is proud to announce the release of the new Horsham rocks website.
What is Horsham rocks?
Horsham Rocks is a non profit group that was formed in 2012. Its a listing of events, artists and venues in Horsham and the surrounding area. In addition, the site aims to promote live music in the area. Gigs are listed with there associated bands and venues with the date and time of the event.
Lightscale's involvement
I was approached by Jamie ‘Stan’ Stanley who is the current admin and PR person for Horsham rocks asking for some help to build a new site. I was keen to take on the project as I have been going to many of the events in the area and wanted to do something to help out.
We needed to develop a new site fairly rapidly so I put together a simple holding page which was placed under a new domain name that Jamie had purchased. We kept a weekly gig guide up to date on this page until a new site was built.
Due to the need for a new site being built quickly and the many requirements of the site I opted to build the new site using WordPress. By doing this I got many features I needed out the box and some other simple parts like the contact form and sitemap could be done with plugins.
For the theme I used the roots sage starter theme. This sets me up for with a set of modern front end development tools. The look and feel of the site was mostly copied from the previous site but with some minor improvements where I felt necessary. Doing it this way suited me well as I'm not a designer.
For the events functionality I built this from scratch using the WordPress posts and meta data. The events system has the ability to do recurring events with many different types of rules for the recurrence. To do the recurring, I had two options process the recurring events on the fly to work out when the next events are or run a job that news single events from the recurring and then just list the single. I opted for the first option as it gives the ability to list the events infinitely into the future if need be. Right now the recurring events do not have as much functionality build as I would like but I will continue to improve them.
Future plans
Even though we have now got the site live, we left off some things that we would like to add. There is many new features that we would like to add to the site and they will gradually make there way to live. This has been a non profit project so my pace of development depends on my other work and free time. We also have more adminstration features that need to be done to improve the management of events. Front end is priority right now but that will trickle off soon.
I personally think it would be good to one day get a graphics designer involed to help improve the look and feel but its not a priority right now. Its more important that the site does its job well.
Check it out!
And If you are in the Horsham area and you want to find some great music events check out the events page here.