A while back, the team here at dt set out to redesign our internal project, Champion Sound. With Champion Sound’s maturation, we felt it would be fitting to create a look to help it along. Some of our goals were to include some fun simple user interactions, bring our communities content to the front, and most importantly of all, educate new users about Champion Sound. We are pumped about the way it turned out, and the dev guys here did an amazing job bringing this new design to life. We are always rolling out new features, so stay tuned!

Reasons for site-wide announcements

If your web site or web application has a regular user base, and you’re constantly innovating (which you should be), then there will be a time when you need to let the users know of planned downtime, or explain why a particular feature is temporarily disabled. A nice notification of some sort is a great way to get the user’s attention while allowing them (or not allowing them) to proceed with thier regular business.

If you’ve used Mint.com, Dropbox or any site that uses the standard top notification bar then you’ve probably seen the “planned maintenance” notification or the “balance is low” warning. The two aforementioned sites are exceptionally good when it comes to UI design and interaction, but some sites just get it wrong. Here are a few tips that can help when designing one of these systems:

• Time the announcements
  If you’ve got a promotion running for 1 week, it pays to have the announcement bar appear only during that time. If you allow your announcements to have a start and end date, it will give an extra dimension to the way you can use them, and makes sure that they don’t start too early or go stale.
• Allow the user to dismiss the announcement
  The most annoying thing that can happen with announcements is the reappearing of an already dismissed announcement. Firstly, provide a close button and when it’s clicked get rid of the announcement, plain and simple. Make it go away and stay away.
• Don’t hide the “Don’t Show Again” button
  That fact is that some users are too impatient or uninterested to read your announcement before quickly closing it. Make your important announcements “sticky”  so they will reappear the next time the user visits the site. On the other hand, if the user has read it and would not like to see it again, make sure that the “Don’t Show Again” check box is prominently displayed and easily accessible
• Store the dismissal in a database if applicable
  If your users have actual accounts on your site and are not just anonymous, don’t just store cookies on their machines for keeping the announcement hidden, but also mark the announcement as read in the database for that user. This way if the user accesses your site from multiple computers, they won’t be bombarded by the same announcements all throughout the day as they switch computers.

The light box/screen lock out

I left this one for last because I’m not sure where I stand on this issue. The light box/screen lock out (dimming the screen and placing a modal dialog or settings pane) can be extremely effective for cases where user information needs to be updated, or action is absolutely required. However, this brings up the issue of stopping the user dead in her tracks simply because you said so. Remember that they are your users, and they’re on your site, but they can always go elsewhere if they become too annoyed.

The main thing to remember when creating an announcement system is that people don’t like popups, they don’t like being interrupted and they definately don’t like losing control of the screen just because you have something to say. It’s also important to remember that locking the users screen with a modal dialog box may be the best choice for some cases, but they never forget where the close box is located on thier browser and they are not afraid to use it.

Working on a slick web application like Champion Sound is a real joy, and keeping up with the times can be challenging. These days Twitter is becoming a household name, and Facebook already is, so it makes sense that Champion Sound should play nicely with these two platforms. If you want to get the word out, email is only part of the solution in today’s social climate. Short messaging has been on a rise since it became popular on mobile phones like the Nokia 5100 series in the late ’90s, and it’s still with us and stronger than ever today.

Champion sound is all about communication, and getting relevant content to your subscribers, so in keeping up with the times we’ve added Twitter and Facebook support to Champion Sound in the past few weeks. The new Shout Out functionality allows Champion Sound users to Shout Out an event or email. This means thier statuses on Facebook, Twitter, or both will be updated with the message and a link to view the rich content on championsound.com. We plan to add MySpace and SMS support soon, and to continue extending the capabilities of what we believe is the best email marketing and promotion tool out there.

For the last few days, we’ve all been enjoying a really fun quirk that brightens up our day at the office. DT is an awesome place to work and my co-workers are a really fun bunch of characters—not that we need any funny, random things to happen during the day, but it just makes everything “funner”, that’s right, “funner”. We’re always just a Champion Sound sign-up away from a “Ba da ding ding ding ding woah!”

Allow me to explain: when someone signs up for a free Champion Sound account, this audio file plays, and we really can’t help but chuckle and be glad that we’ve got yet another user checking out our product. Sure, we get automated emails for each sign-up, but who gets excited over an email anymore? The email is really there for technical and informative reasons—not to be funny or to boost morale. The audio sample playing on the other hand, is hilarious! It’s just awesome to be working quietly among your co-workers when out of nowhere, “Ba da ding ding ding ding woah!” and we all smile and chuckle at the comforting novelty that is our new user signal.

“Champion Sound” is a phrase often used in reggae music and it’s even used in SNL’s Digital-Short Ras Trent. A few of us developers and designers at DT are big fans of the Ras Trent short. We often find ourselves singing bits and pieces of it as we work. A while back, I thought to myself “Hey, wouldn’t it be awesome if everytime someone signed up for Champion Sound, a clip of Ras Trent played?” Indeed it would… I connected a pair of speakers to one of our staging servers and set up a simple email notification sound. The results, priceless.

Champion Sound scored a bit of coverage in the last week thanks to some music related blog posts.  We were recently featured in the Mashable article, “Social Music: 5 Essential Tools for Marketing Your Band” written by Jenn Van Grove.

The Guest List application also got some nice coverage on music in BPM, a magazine covering music, nightlife, tech and style.  Here’s the coverage: “DJs now promote, manage events on the phone, online, or at the club.”

We’d appreciate your support of the articles with links or comments.

Champion Sound is an web application that we have been building with our spare time here at dt.  It’s a free email marketing and information broadcast tool to help musicians, promoters and venues promote their music.  We’ve been hard at work on and have some great new features to report.

We just got out of the studio and produced this tasty video to explain Champion Sound in a bit more detail.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We’ve recently built a mobile marketing tool that allows musicians to manage their fan base in the studio, on the go or at the club wherever they may be. Venues can ditch the clipboard and manage guest lists or VIP lists via their mobile phone with our free guest list management tool. Event promoters can add fans to their marketing list or email last-minute reminders from wherever they may be. The mobile version of the broadcast and guest list management tool is available on the iPhone and Blackberry, as well as many other mobile phone models.

We put out a press release today in collaboration with Jen at RockStar Communications. Here’s a summary of the new features, benefits and capabilities.  For more details, take a look at the full press release. It is also embedded below with the new PRTube feature of PRLeap.com.

• Building and promoting guest lists online through email, website and social media
• Venue door staff managing the guest list from a mobile phone
• Overseeing one or hundreds of email lists for by venue, artist and VIPs
• Personalizing by uploading a band flyer or other tailored graphics
• Tracking how many people opened, clicked on and forwarded the invitation email
• Adding people to the list at the club during the event for future mailings
• Harnessing full email promotional power at no cost

Champion Sound Offers Free Fan Promotion And Guest List Management Online, On The Phone And At The Club

Press Release on PR Leap

As featured in the Mashable review, ‘25 Tools For The Independent Musician’.

Champion Sound launched into Private Beta about two months ago and we’ve been hammering this puppy hard, plugging holes, adding a few features, squashing a few bugs, etc., etc. Well, we just launched a few awesome features that will make email blast creation super simple.

Image Library

Booyah, we’ve finally got an image library, and this image library kicks some arse. I’ve dealt with some good email campaign image libraries and a ton of bad ones. We’ve taken a few of the best image library management features we’ve always wanted and added them in to make an easy to use, unique experience:

• AJAX upload bar – real time feedback while uploading an image thats a little large
• Automatic Image Scaling – automatic image dimension scaling to 600 pixels wide (the email width standard). No need to have Photoshop or require your designer to take that print poster and scale it down to an email friendly size. Just upload the JPEG, GIF, or PNG directly and we scale it to fit for you so your emails always look great!
• Full Image Library Maintenance from within the Email Editor – No more having to jump back and forth between your image library and your email creation window. Just click the insert image button and browse your library, upload new images and delete old images right there.

Automatic Drafts

Internet Explorer crash on you in the middle of a creating a blast again? Started making your email, but still waiting on creative from your designer? Want to get ahead on creating next week’s event notification, but don’t want to schedule it to send yet? No Problem! Now, your email blasts will automatically be saved as a draft and accessible from your account’s Overview page. When you’re ready to resume editing, just click on the blast name from the draft list and you’ll be taken back right where you left off!

Forward to a friend

Now all recipients of your email blasts can forward your email to their friends! With our easy forward to a friend form, your subscribers can forward your email to up to 10 other people at a time. Talk about viral spread!

Awesome new email template

We’ve upped the bar for sponsor quality and setup a killer new template for your emails to be sent in.

These are just a few of the features we’ve had rolling around in our heads. Keep checking back here for more Champion Sound feature launches!

dt has just announced a new web app designed specifically for DJs, musicians and bands. Its our first and the first of its kind really. After all, email marketing is not that cheap, it also is hard to use for the novice marketer. We set our to solve that through ChampionSound.com.

Champion Sound is easy to use, you don’t need a background in email marketing like some of the leading solutions. Champion Sound is also FREE, yes it will not cost anything to the user. With fan-based email lists easily reaching into six figures we know offereing an email solution where you don’t pay for every email can be very power tool.

We are currently building a list for the upcoming beta test – please visit www.championsound.com to sign up.