Urban Rebel PR

Urban Rebel is a creative communications agency that delivers global campaigns for the music, entertainment, and lifestyle industries.

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The Project

Urban Rebel PR are a communications agency that specialise in PR for the music and entertainment industry. They work with artists such as Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike, Darude and Sony Music. I’ve been working with Urban Rebel PR for a number of years. They wanted a rebranding, however the biggest pain point on their previous site was with the “Client Roster”. Being the PR agency of a number of artists and events, adding an event to their roster was a long and laborious process, as these were pages, built in Divi, that needed restructuring manually. Anything to make it easier for the client to add and remove artists would be welcome.

What I Proposed

As well as a brand new custom developed website built on the Kadence theme, I proposed a system using WordPress’ custom post type functionality that would automatically sort the artists by alphabetical order. I also developed a custom WordPress block that would allow users to feature artists on blog posts and on other sections of the site. I also proposed switching from the current system of contacting artists to Gravity Forms. On the old site you wouldn’t know which page enquiries were coming from, and enquiries using the Divi form were being lost. Furthermore, there were three different blog post types – the standard news, interviews and resources, so trying to restructure these into one area could be useful.

What I Did

• Remove Divi and build a new theme, a child theme of Kadence. Kadence is a hybrid/full site editor theme, which is a lot more user friendly and lighter than Divi, and it uses WordPress’ new editor. I also implemented Urban Rebel’s branding colours as the website’s pallette.
• Build a custom WordPress plugin that handled the roster page, allowing the client to add/remove and reorganise clients with ease. From the discovery phase Urban Rebel PR had a “card” design that they liked the look of, so that was implemented as well. I also created a fully CSS hover effect that looks great!
• Build a custom WordPress block allowing artists to be featured elsewhere on the website. This uses the card design as described in the previous step.
• Make sure the three different blog post types were set up as posts (resources were pages), and build some redirects from the old URLs to the new URLs to ensure no traffic is lost. Between myself and the SEO freelancer working on the project, we decided that keeping the three types of posts separate would be better, but we made sure all three acted as posts.
• Replace current forms with Gravity Forms, and set up DKIM and SPF records to ensure emails are trusted by mailservers worldwide. I also made sure that the Gravity Forms submissions could be found within WordPress in the unlikely event enquiries got lost.
• Connect the client with a trusted designer to design a logo and iconography for the website.
• WordPress training on the new system. The client had extensive knowledge of adding information to WordPress, so this was relatively simple.

Challenges

The biggest challenge was discovery and addition of the artists’ social media profiles. As well as the standard social media profiles, you had a number of obscure networks that whilst popular to musicians, were less well known to the general public. Making sure all networks were covered was a challenge. Furthermore, duos or groups may have their own individual social media profiles. In the end a custom solution was devised that allowed Urban Rebel to build buttons for each artists outside of the usual networks. They can assign a button colour as well should they wish, but it defaults to the standard Urban Rebel PR branding.

The other big challenge was Divi. The content within Divi is stored in shortcodes, which – whilst fine to display small amounts of data – means that it becomes quite unreadable. Thankfully the blogs (which account for 90% of the content) didn’t use Divi’s editor. The pages were easy enough to convert from the live site, but the roster pages (which was about 100 or so pages) needed a method of transferring. Working with the client we came up with an easy to follow system so that, once trained, they could easily transfer theses pages from the old site to the new site.

Results

At the end of the project, Urban Rebel PR had the following:-

From the Client

Stuck at sea without a paddle… but then Rhys came to the rescue! He was not only a lifeline for fixing some minor site issues, at the time, but then cracked open the hood of the site and did a complete overhaul from design to backend. Which was a blessing, if purely for the time it was saving us. Silly updating issues, no more a factor. Tasks that were taking unnecessarily lengthy periods of time, no longer something to worry about. Very happy with the final site, it’s speed and functionality. I cannot recommend Rhys highly enough.

Vass
Director, Urban Rebel PR