The Brothers Streep are sweet. They are so sweet in fact, that I decided to make them a website. They were initially a small 2-piece acoustic comedy group and have since developed into a less small 5-piece acoustic comedy group. They’re a fun group of guys who make people laugh for a living and they are good at it.

Their website needed to be slightly different to most band websites in that it actually needed to be good (unfortunately most band websites seem to have an inexplicable need to keep their users trapped in a tiny UI and have music streaming constantly – 2 features that make any website totally unbearable). They required the standard band website features such as music downloads and a gig guide. They also wanted a fully functional blog in order to keep their comedy going outside of just their music (you should go read a few of them – you’ll laugh, trust me). You would think I would make something like this in WordPress or a similar CMS, but no – this was in the days when I still needed to prove to myself that I could code. As a result, the website is entirely custom-built using a very loose no-framework framework that I designed myself (I dubbed it the ‘Streep Framework’ as a working title). All aspects of the site are entirely managable from a rich back-end. They manage users, blogs, songs, podcasts and the other random/nonsensical sections that they occassionally request to be added to the site (such as Paint Hearted and Things With Legs).

One of the more prominent features I created for the site was an advent calendar for Christmas 2010. It worked like you would expect an advent calendar to work – each day of the month is in a separate block and clicking on a day reveals a new gift. In this case the gift each day was a mini podcast of the band answering user-submitted Christmas questions. Only the current and past days were available on the calendar and I made use of cookies to track which days’ gifts had already been opened so that returning visitors would be able to see which ones they had listened to before. The calendar now remains active and all the gifts are accessible to users (as well as one MP3 being available containing all the gifts), however the cookie functionality has been removed. You can have a look at the calendar as it stands now by using this handy link.

The design of the website was done entirely by the band’s drummer Timmy Price (who just so happens to be a mighty talented designer as well as a drummer). I added a few UI elements into the mix, but on the whole Timmy did a superb job with the design – as a web developer it’s always a pleasure to work with great designers who understand what it means to design for the web.

Needless to say, working on this website has been loads of fun and working with the band is an endless laugh. I continue to do support for the site and add enhancements as requested. This work is a pleasure to do and I consider this website to be my first big project that I can truly call my own. I often use it as a sandbox for new ideas I have that require an existing environment with active users to be properly tested.

Details:

• URL: http://www.brothersstreep.com
• Platform/Framework: Streep Framework (self-built)
• Javascript library: jQuery
• Main features: All content managed entirely by client