Atomised: the Web Design Co-operative

The Project

Moojuice Records is a small independent record label & artist collective based in Dunfermline, Fife but with artists on the label as far away as Frankfurt in Germany. Atomised have been responsible for every iteration of www.moojuicerecords.com since its initial launch in December 2005. Additionally, Atomised's Al Macmillan designed 'Moo' the classic Moojuice cow logo. The first version of the Moojuice Records site was an accessible XHTML Strict & CSS site with artists sections, news and some paypal e-commerce. This was temporarily replaced with a Wordpress-powered blog while a more permanent site solution was cooked up.

For their new site Atomised had problems Moojuice wanted quite a list of features (e-commerce store, newsletter facility, full cms, blog) but had a miniscule budget! Not to be outdone, we set about seeing what we could do on a tight budget. The biggest issue was finding an e-commerce platform that could do everything else on the list but we found it in Virtuemart & Joomla!. Virtuemart,which while perhaps slightly rough and ready, is an e-commerce extension for the open-source cms Jommla! which itself has a huge amount of open-source plugins which while perhaps a less than perfect solution helped us get the job done. Another reason for using Joomla! was that we had a really tight time scale. Moojuice needed the site up and running to do a pre-release for their artist Dan Lyth which involved being able to sell digital downloads as well as physical product such as T-Shirts and CD's. Actually, a lot of e-commerce platforms don't have digital download facilities at all. Virtuemart though could deal with both - so it was an ideal candidate. The label also wanted to securely use Google Checkout as their new payment platform. We had to integrate that with secure certification.

The site was up and running in under 4 weeks just in time for Moojuice to email its mailing list (now integrated and managed from Joomla) to let them know that for a limited period Dan's new album was available Radiohead-style in a ?5 download, ?10 cd or ?25 limited edition pack. The results were a huge success for the label and the Virtuemart powered store securely operated The site has carried on since and carried such news as Moojuice band The Scottish Enlightenment's tour with Idlewild and has continued to power this small record labels remarkable story.