Fuzzy Future Technologies

Groovy Grooves: Online Video Blog and Amateur Musician Community. Our challenge for this project was to create an online community centred around amateur musician videos that accomplished three goals. 1) It needed to be easy to update multiple times a day from a wide variety of video content. 2) The project had to allow visitors to interact and build a community around submitted content. 3) The end result needed to be easy to update without significant downtime for the users.

Our Approach

In order to ensure the site was easy to update and easy to maintain on a daily basis, we decided to build everything on top of an established content management platform, WordPress. WordPress is a blogging platform, so we needed to modify it support video content instead of text content, but still maintain standard blogging features such as comments and user accounts. For the site to catch on and start building a community, it needed to be highly inductive to linking via social networking sites and also rank well in Google searches. We worked with our client to ensure that all of these features would be built into the final project.

Our Expertise

To accomplish the project goals, we developed a customized WordPress theme that focused highly on encouraging user participation in the site via star-rankings for videos, visitor comments, social networking links, and tools to allow visitors to embed video content in their own site. We created several custom WordPress plugins that allowed for managing of video posts and incorporation of video content in RSS feeds. We modified the standard WordPress layout to highlight video content instead of text content and optimized the site to withstand the flooding of traffic that occurs with viral video content from sites like Digg and StumbleUpon. Finally, our team built a custom administration interface for uploading and converting video content so new posts could be displayed on the site.

Our Results

Overall, this project has been a resounding success and has generated a positive community of music enthusiasts that continue to contribute new comments and videos to the site (as of this posting there are over 500 videos and 3000 comments on the site in just over 1 year of operation). This site has performed exceptionally well and has been featured multiple times as front page content on the social networking sites Digg, StumbleUpon, and Reddit without crashing due to overwhelming traffic. Due to our search engine optimization techniques, this site has continued rank very highly in Google’s search engine index for keywords such as "Musician Videos" and "Singing Videos."