Overview

Christian Hale is a Billboard-charting music producer, songwriter, content creator, and coach.His music has amassed hundreds of millions of streams and has been licensed by major brands and networks, including Nike, Google, Netflix, Hulu, HGTV, Tennessee Titans, and several others.

In addition to his success in the music space, Christian is passionate about education. He recently rolled out a Youtube channel and coaching services, providing invaluable resources to creatives and music makers. He came to Virtue with no pre-existing website, in need of an online solution from the ground-up.

Challenge

Christian’s website had a few unique challenges, both on the “front end” (visually) and “back end” (infrastructure). Starting with the former, we needed to craft an aesthetic that mirrored the high quality inherent in Christian’s music, content, and coaching services. It was important to appeal both to his high-level music production clients of artists and labels with substantial budgets, while simultaneously catering to his wider YouTube audience, offering both premium music services and free resources.

A large purpose of this site was to essentially create Christian’s own marketing funnel, driving people from Youtube into his own fully controllable marketing infrastructure. With this, email collection was at the center of the site’s development. We needed to create multiple forms for various products and offers which automatically collected and categorized these emails into Christian’s mailing list. The task encompassed a strategic blend of sophisticated design while serving the diverse needs of varying clientele, coupled with an emphasis on robust email collection methods.

Process

We began the process with a deep dive into Christian’s visual brand. This involved curating a distinct look and feel for the site, setting the tone with a style guide and site wireframe as is standard in all Virtue-built sites. This allowed Christian and I to be on the same page with where we were headed visually before jumping into the nuts and bolts of the site development.

We also decided to hire a professional photographer to capture high quality photos. In the end, these would be instrumental in conveying the first-rate essence that defined Christian’s brand. Professional photography made a huge difference in conveying the high quality look we set out for in Christian’s site, and while I can always use stock images, I think professional photography is always a worthwhile investment if your budget allows.

With the aesthetic framework established, I began building out the website and the focus shifted to the intricacies of the backend. Working alongside Christian, I meticulously built out an infrastructure to accommodate his various services, implementing eight strategically placed forms and email opt-ins across various pages. Leveraging the power of Gravity Forms (which is available for any Virtue built site), I was able to connect and automatically tag each form submission to his mailing list in Mailchimp. This integration not only facilitated streamlined user interaction but also automatically funneled and categorized potential clients and customers into Christian’s own mailing infrastructure.