Plugging through tonight on the site

Paul Seiz on May 23, 2020

If you’re reading this, you might stumbled upon the soft-launch of this website

I made great strides tonight on my reduxxxx website. While the my kids and cousins ate pizza and watched movies, I put together a list of 300 songs that comprise my repertoire. They were dutifully inputted into a spreadsheet, and then uploaded to a graphics program called Flourish.Studio.

The goal is here to have a cute, interactive version of my repertoire that is accessible live online. I find my repertoire projects branching off in different directions now.

  1. A public version of my rep that I share with audiences, categorized by mood

  2. A public version of my rep that I share with audiences, categorized by traditional genre.

  3. A private version of my rep that is completely comprehensive, with songs weighted and categorized for how useful they are, and my ability to play them confidently without aid.

This last piece is to keep me rep on deep-freeze while on quarantine. When I’m called up for my first request show, I’ll need a day to practice and review what’s fresh and what’s grown stale in my mind. No doubt I’ll need to create a series of lyrics and chord charts to serve as crutches for my first gigs back.

I’ve got the full list at 326 songs. Even with beautiful graphics, that amount of information (300 song titles) seems overwhelming to the user. I cut it down to 300 and experimented with formats, and I’ll definitely need to optimize the final graphics for mobile, since I’ll be encouraging folks to access the graphic during my shows. It still seems like cutting the public rep down to 250 is the way to go, with disclaimers included that this is a sampling of my full repertoire. Maybe it’s best to keep that mysterious.

Brooke encouraged me to add a spot for email sign-ups, and a space for upcoming shows, including our unofficial Drive Way concert the weekend of Father’s Day. I’d like to see the navigation bar of the site a bit more obvious, so the user has a sense of where to go and what to do, unless I stick with the whole shebang being one big scroll-down. Navigating to different pages might not be necessary when I’m offering services.

I’m unsure for the process for publishing blog posts. Route them through A Couple Duets FB page, or post to my personal news feed and twitter? Trying to wean myself from social media, so I don’t want to ride or die on this.

Another couple days of focused work on the site, and I’ll have something ready to launch.

Cheers.