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http://www.bmi.com

Give us some background on some of the members of your team and the company that you work for.

My name is Eric Miller and I run a Brooklyn-based graphic design and web development studio called Eric Miller Design. I’ve been creating websites and designing for print since 1998, and using ExpressionEngine since it was pMachine. We are members of the Pro Network, and focus on clean, usable websites and interfaces. I am also a writer, responsible for the graphic design section on about.com, a NY Times company.

I was part of the team that built BMI’s first ExpressionEngine-powered site in 2005, and I have been working in various roles for the company for over 13 years. David Bills and his team build BMI.com in-house, but they hired me as lead designer and for ExpressionEngine development.

Tell us about the site. What vision were you trying to fill for the client?

BMI represents more than 475,000 songwriters, composers and music publishers. They collect license fees and distribute them as royalties to those members whose works have been performed. BMI’s site serves many functions. Songwriters can join BMI online, and existing members have online access to manage their account, get discounts and career advice. Businesses can obtain a license to play BMI music and search the BMI catalog of more than 6.5 million musical works. There is also extensive content for music fans, including artist features and video clips from BMI events.

With so many different audiences on the site, our vision was to speak to all of them while keeping the site clean and easy to navigate. In the latest version of the site design, large dropdown panels were added to each navigation item to keep important functionality available to these audiences. New members can start the join process, existing members can login, songwriters can access important resources, business can search for a license and music professionals can search the song catalog. A visitor who does not fit in these groups, such as a music fan, can also get a quick overview on BMI, also within the navigation.

Another goal was to be able to feature the wide variety of content on the site, also without overwhelming the visitor. On the home page, featured events, videos, news and photos are all browsable. We’ve expanded that to other pages such as genres, locations and individual songwriter/artist pages in the “Roster.”

There are also many users on the back-end that are updating various sections of the site, from human resources adding job listings to the media relations department posting event photos. We’ve taken full advantage of member groups with almost 40 different levels of access.

Was there a specific reason why EE was chosen for this project? Why?

EE was chosen for the project because of its flexibility and ease-of-use.

The site has so many content types, so we needed a system that could manage them all with complete control over how that content is presented. New sections and features are built on a monthly basis, and EE and the great add-on developer community makes that possible. It also allows for the member functionality we needed, accommodating the different editor levels and end-users.

What add-ons were used? and why?

The ExpressionEngine setup of BMI.com is complex, with over 40 weblogs, 80 add-ons, 6,000 categories, 20,000 entries and a great deal of custom development.

With so many add-ons at work, I’ll highlight just a few here. A customized version of the ImageSizer plugin is used throughout the news, features and photo galleries to handle generating thumbnails from full screen images. The User module is used to maintain a completely separate environment for the BMI media relations team, who manage the Press section of the site. We recently set up a system using Matrix and Playa to easily build pages for special events such as South by Southwest, highlighting news, photos, videos and other content from various weblogs. Custom modules perform functions such as event registration and provide tools for site administrators to manage content outside of the control panel.

What difficulties did you encounter? How did you address them? Was there a particular add-on that got you out of a bind?

One of the biggest challenges was managing the large collection of photos, which gets bigger every day. We developed a system for the site using weblog entries for each image, that allows for easy creation of galleries by keyword or category. A single line of code can be inserted in an entry or template that creates a gallery from a particular event, music genre, songwriter, location or other variable.

Another challenge was managing BMI’s many email campaigns and mailing lists. We redesigned their email newsletters, and used Champagne as a perfect solution to deliver them directly through ExpressionEngine.

 

Other Add-ons

Champagne
Diggie
Photo Gallery Extended

Company: Eric Miller Design

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