Contact is an online publication that showcases contemporary art and sound. They question how technology has influenced the art we create, providing a platform for those whose identity and art exists within the virtual space.
contact.online is a Perth based online publication that showcases contemporary artists and musicians. Their new website features dynamic posts and e-commerce functionality. They now manage the site independently and attract hundreds of visitors daily.
Dylan, the founder of contact.online, approached us looking for a partner to develop an online article based website for his new endeavor. The publication’s primary focus would be interviewing artists and musicians from around the world about relevant topics and questions relating to their line of work. A secondary focus for Dylan was the selling of merchandise to fund the project. The challenge on top of all this was to make it easy for their team to access and manage the website from the backend.
The contact.online website takes advantage of the blog functionality of WordPress and dynamically populates each page when a new article is published. We built a custom theme that features a range of unique design loops that are able to be dynamically filled with any selected post. In basic terms, the provided text gets automatically entered into a design template that we created, meaning there is no additional design work for the client. We used the design loops for the design of both articles and shop items.
We configured the shop page with WooCommerce. We linked multiple payment options, designed the product pages, configured global shipping classes, enabled stock management, and provided pre-order capabilities.
The outcome
Contact is now a living and functioning website that attracts new and returning visitors daily. The team is able to easily manage the site and has not required assistance from A44. A website this heavily dependent on a specific visual style is often very hard for the average user to navigate, but we have done just that.
With such diverse content, we had to consider the global audience, meaning that hosting speed was important. This site is built on a custom AWS Lightsail instance, which is costing approximately $12AUD/month.
Within the first few hours of launch, the website had already received over 800 new visitors. The server handled the launch exceptionally well and peaked at only 50% usage of virtual resources. If required, we could have upgraded the hosting plan and made the switchover with zero downtime for only an additioanl $4 AUD/Month. The site has attracted over 3000 unique visitors in the first 30 days from launch.
