Overview

Darren Hayes has partnered with Block 81 since 2014 and as he was gearing up to announce his first single in years, we worked with Darren to create stopgap solutions for his website until he was ready for a complete revamp. When it came time to revamp the site, we worked closely with Darren and his album designer to get it just right. Our focus for this collaboration was building out the site and ensuring it was as accessible as we could make it within the budget.

Client: Darren Hayes
Project Type: Musician website
Services: Email marketing, website development
Year: 2022

Goals

Email list cleanup

As part of the ramp-up to announcing his new single, album, and tour, Darren’s underused email list would need to get cleaned up.

Iterative website

The project was done in short phases and each one needed a relatively quick turnaround.

Email marketing

Part of the larger campaign of announcing all the things, Darren needed to be able to send out emails to his audience. Not having sent much in the way of emails in the previous year or so, that meant we had to do quite a bit of cleanup in order to stay within the bounds of opt-in email marketing. We created a plan to give subscribers to his email list the opportunity to stay on the list and others didn’t have to do anything to be removed.

Code & website iterations

The first iteration of the new site was a dead simple “splash page” that featured a new logotype and an email signup form. Behind the scenes, we stripped away all the old content and upgraded the content management system powering the site.

Tour announcement pages

Not too long after the splash page was up and the email list was gathering lots of subscribers, we built the first tour-specific page which replaced the landing page. That was followed by another home page replacement—the UK tour page replaced the Australia tour page. The Australia tour page was still made available on the site—it simply got moved to a new location. The most challenging aspect of this piece was coordinating launch at the right time to match up with ticket pre-sales.

The album home page

After keeping the tour pages in place for a while, it was time to announce the album. For this, Darren’s album designer provided the artwork we needed for the extremely simple home page—a mirror of Darren’s album cover artwork. The tour information got condensed into a new tour page which now featured the US tour dates, as well as Australia and UK.

Results

This project was a bit different since it was more iterative and building up to something as opposed to a more traditional website project with one final reveal. In the end, Darren was happy with not just the work at each point, but our responsiveness and ability to meet relatively tight turnarounds.