Smiler Tumblr Theme
Smiler already had a fairly strong online presence when he signed to Warner Bros, so we decided to maintain his Tumblr blog and enhance that to be his official website.
Kate Brighouse designed a logo and header navigation for the site while I got to work on a custom Tumblr theme.
The theme demonstrates that a Tumblr site can serve as a very effective website. Smiler’s blogs all appear on the home page along with social sharing functionality. His blog is linked to Facebook and Twitter, automatically notifying fans about new posts.
I included a sidebar which has a php twitter feed. The widget has a caching feature to ensure that the api request limit doesn’t cause the site to display an empty feed.
I manually added additional pages to display videos (YouTube embeds), Music (a Soundcloud player with all the latest tracks), Lyrics (manually added), and tour dates (using the BandsInTown javascript widget).
The website is clean and simple, but a very efficient use of Tumblr to power a blog-focussed site.
