Making this Site

The Story

This site was a true collaboration by three of us: my brother Danny, my husband Jonathan, and myself (together we form MatchaSoft).

I wanted a custom designed and self-hosted music portfolio site. I've spent years developing my music branding and had a few Squarespace and Wordpress websites, which I ended up turning off each time as I was never fully satisfied and wanted to save money.

This new site should be the final thing: both beautiful and functional, not overloaded with bloated content or ugly song players, and self-hosted so I wasn't locked into a subscription. I designed a simple mockup, since they already offered to develop a site for me, and hoping they would be excited aobut the design.

I showed it to them, and Danny suggested we could have a cool "portal" like animation where a larger custom player appears when you click on a song. Then Jonathan had the idea that we could create a mini player of the current song as you scroll down the page.

(By the way, anyone who works with developers: there's great power in coming up with projects that get them excited, and using their ideas too. Developers can have great taste too. Please don't treat them like code monkeys.)

Since we were all doing this as a side project, I wouldn't have asked them to do so much work. But since they were getting excited too, we went in this direction! The concept was starting to feel like a mix of a website and a little web app.

Danny whipped up a draft of the site very quickly because he's a brilliant dev, including the most complex elements (the custom song player). He gave me access to the code, and though I'm not a developer, I know some concepts. The three of us were able to finish the site together.

Now, here it is!