*AND IT’S UP!!* the new amandapalmer.net {official Thing} (Patreon)

{public post}

*edit! the site is now LIVE! please go see it at amandapalmer.net*

hello wonderful ones !!

if you you don't want to read this whole long, nerdy post, this is what you need to know:

many years and many tens of thousands of dollars later, OUR NEW WEBSITE, AMANDAPALMER.NET, is now up and running after MANY iterations and paths of development. champagne and kombucha bottles iz cracking all over team AFP global!!!!

and, my friends....having this patreon - and the funding you provide us - made it possible to build the best and deepest site we've ever had. 

please....enjoy it, and please pat yourselves on the back for helping us to make it happen.

here it is!!!!

 AMANDAPALMER.NET

.........

and now, the longer (really longer) story, with a lot of help from hayley.

many moons ago, almost exactly 4 years ago, i asked all patrons what they thought about potentially "thinging" a new website in a post titled, "a few questions for today's town hall meeting...": https://www.patreon.com/posts/few-questions-6134226

thank you for saying yes.

it made it possible to create something really expensive, fancy, and powerful.

the story of this new website's development is SO epic. 

oh my dear god.

i have wanted to re-haul the entire amandapalmer.net site since before my kickstarter and the "theatre is evil" days. it was always last on the list of things to do...and my brain always had a really hard time wrapping itself around HOW to build a site that would serve all the things i wanted a website to be. i'm a weird artist, a weird person, and this community is a huge one. meanwhile, i was watching technology change daily, and i was growing more and more disenchanted with social media. i wanted to be able to build something WORTHWHILE.

i make so many things, and want to BE so many things.

a musician.

a bookwriter.

a touring perfomer.

a person who sells things.

a person who makes videos, and a podcast, and ... other weird projects.

a person who asks questions, and wants to be asked.

a person who likes to help.

a person who wants a place for her community that isn't facebook or twitter.

i kept changing my mind about what we needed (typical of me), changing our approach about what to build, and how it should look.

then...life would happen. 

albums and projects and tours and friends with cancer and book-writing and babies would take first place in the priority queue, and the whole team - and i -would shift focus again and again...and it started to feel like the project that kept eating it's own tail, never to be perfect and never to be completed. 

this website and its delays became a running joke within the team. it was the thing that always got pushed to the back burner, again and again and again.

those who know me know that i'm a weird kind of perfectionist.

sometime i like things to happen REALLY FAST. i just wrote and recorded and released an epic song in a few months, and i love that sort of fast and furious energy. a website is not like that. it takes so much meticulous time, energy, and collaborative work.

this site has been a real thorn in my side....it was never the right thing, the right timing, the right design, i always wanted to just be able to wave a magic wand, work hard for a day or two and POOF, unveil the world's perfect website for a weirdo multimedia artist with a robust and intelligent community that really wants to be interconnected.

.........

now, finally, after many years, it is READY. well, mostly ready. it'll keep growing. but we have a gorgeous start.

i cannot tell you how relieved - and how PROUD - i am to finally be launching this behemoth.

hayley rosenblum from team AFP, my gal friday in new york who many of you know well by now, has been one of the key people helping me connect the dots over the years, so i thought it would be good to turn the mic over to her completely for the majority of this post. she's been in the trenches, working with me and the design team to birth this site.

so, over to hayley!!!

hi everyone!

I have been working with Amanda in various capacities for the last 11 years. In that time, I have often been a historian for Amanda and the team, recalling conversations and situations that have happened in her career and on the internet that for many seem long forgotten, or in some cases, repressed. {HEY, that's not funny. wait yes it is -afp}

Within all this ancient history, Amanda's website has been haunting her for about 8 years now, maybe even more. While I have been hard at work with the team to bring you this new spiffy website, I wanted to take a moment to share with you the near decade journey that has lead up to this new site unveiling today. 

Here's a trip down memory lane to help put into context what this website - the 2020 newly launched beautiful and customizable site - means to Amanda and the team.

In 2009, before Patreon or Kickstarter or even before the word "crowdfunding" existed, Amanda was thinking about how to use her website as a place to accept donations and recognize patrons of her art. If you have copies of any of her albums released in 2010 (like the Radiohead covers EP) you'll see a small circular logo on the back, which was representative of her idea called "The Till" - a way for fans to tip artists directly, something Amanda wanted to create for her community to be used by any and all others. 

The Till logo {i am pretty sure this was designed by beth hommel...my assiatnt at the time - AFP}

While that never fully took off, due to a whole assortment of reasons, it has always been on Amanda's mind to use her website and her community to participate together in the art and her music releases. 

Here's one of the earliest emails I have from Amanda about AmandaPalmer.net, sent a couple weeks after I joined the team as a management intern in 2009:

She's always thought about her site not just as a central place on the internet to get news about her art and music, but as a place that was functional, useful, worthwhile for the community to gather to. 

In the early days of AmandaPalmer.net, it was maintained by one person (Sean, aka indecisean) and at one time, I was able to log in and update news posts, it was simple, not robust, but did what we needed it to do while social media networks were just emerging as new toys, and new hubs of information.

Here's what AmandaPalmer.net looked like in September 2008, a snapshot captured by the internet archive. This would be the very first incarnation of Amanda's own website, when she embarked on the release of her first solo album, Who Killed Amanda Palmer.

By the following year, 2009, the site needed to be updated to be about MORE than just Amanda's debut solo album, it needed to encompass all the projects she was working on and so her website was updated. 

She was also in the process of leaving her record label, so as part of being an independent musician, she would embark on retaining the reins of her own internet properties. This is what it looked like a year and half later in February 2010 (as a reminder, the top white bar is a toolbar from the internet archive, it's not an advertisement embedded in the site or anything like that):

Two years later, in 2012 Amanda was preparing to release Theatre Is Evil and with that album and world tour, she wanted to have a brand new website that could be used as an interactive place to showcase fan photos that were used on tour in the stage projections and she wanted a site that could be updated to incorporate the modern use of her social media platforms, fan art collections and a whole lot more.  

This is where things get... complicated.

In 2012 a team was hired to rebuild Amanda's website, it looked pretty...

....but there were some complications, all of which I'm not quite sure I remember the full story  (remember, I said some things have been forgotten or repressed? This is one of those things.) but things got pretty messy here.

All I can recall here is that the site worked okay for the tour and the album, but it didn't serve all the functions Amanda envisioned (especially in the newly altered Shadowbox that came with it, I will be blunt here and say that part of the site outright sucked). 

The biggest issue with this version of the site was that even after thousands of dollars and designs and all that goes into building a website, it wasn't easy for Amanda and the team to update and it was not future-proof. It got outdated fast and could not adapt to changes in technology, the internet or social media in the ways Amanda envisioned her home on the internet would adapt.

If I may be so bold, I would say this fact has been one of the biggest pain points of Amanda's business for the last several years: the frustration of not being able to use her website to connect with all of you the way she wants to, and the site's inability to be the community hub FOR YOU that she wants it to be.

In 2013 Amanda began to work with a new internet team and eventually, she had them work on her website to turn it into something functional for the time being. That team was Fame House, an agency Amanda worked with for over 7 years, whose relationship in that time has been so vital to Amanda's internet workings and independent music releases. 

Don't forget, Amanda is her own record label, and therefore, she's a fully-fledged small business. Her work does not stop at writing songs, she's involved in each step of the way from writing to release, art direction to release planning and that includes building out, and employing, the team that can handle all these details for her. 

At this time, Amanda didn't have the same resources to put into building a new website from the ground up again, to be quite blunt: it costs many thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours to do that and with no record label, investors or patrons at that time, it wasn't financially feasible to start all over after just building a new site only a year prior.

Fame House came in and went to work to make AmandaPalmer.net salvageable and functional, even though at times it felt like we were using duct tape and band-aids because the site was built on an old version of Wordpress that could not be updated to incorporate more modern technology and features.

If you have a keen eye, you may notice that the above 2012 version of AmandaPalmer.net looks a lot like the version of Amanda's website before we updated it today.

Aug 20, 2020:

And it's true. The website that Amanda has been using, up until now, is old and outdated. And it's not due to lack of vision or effort, we did the best with what we had accessible to us. 

For every Patreon Project that required its own project page (ie: http://amandapalmer.net/machete ) it required hours of work for a human person to code even the most simple of information into the most basic of web pages. This was not efficient.

And so since around 2014 and 2015, Nick at Fame House and his team have been working on what this new website would be, how it would look, how it would function, and most importantly: how it could stay up to date with changing internet trends and web technology. In Fall 2016 I rejoined Amanda's team full time (after a few years of doing my thing elsewhere and helping her part time) and we all dove right in trying to make this project happen, once and for all. 

We'd joke with Nick that this was his White Whale because every few months he'd poke Amanda where we left off to try to massage this project along. And predictably, the conversation would stall, until a few months later another poke...

You may ask, why did it take over 6 years from that point on to launch the website? Well, with the Patreon working so well to afford Amanda the ability to create unfettered art and maintain the business behind it that fuels her independent music career, it was no easy task to get all the stake holders, and Amanda specifically, pinned down to map out the vision especially as the vision was constantly a moving target as Amanda got more inspired and sometimes, less inspired, to work on it. 

When you have a young son, a world tour and the biggest, rawest album of your career on deck to be released, there are some more urgent and important things to tend to then picking out your favorite hyperlink color and explaining in detail your aesthetic to designers who many not speak the same creative language as you.

One of the ways Amanda has wanted her site to serve you, her community, was by re-building The Shadowbox forum. That, too, was a project that took years in the making to happen and while we worked on it in the background (sussing out new technology platforms, strategizing how it could work with Amanda's patreon, and determining whether we make a new AFP forum or reignite the previous incarnation - The Shadowbox - which served Dresden Dolls fans too... etc.). We had our answers, we knew what we wanted to do, and we planned to re-launch The Shadowbox along with the new AmandaPalmer.net. However, with lockdowns happening throughout the world this past March, and with the website at that point still in it's design stage, Amanda made the decision to launch The Shadowbox ahead of schedule so that we all had a place to congregate, separately, but together. And so I, along with the team, rolled up our sleeves and put The Shadowbox out in April, just in time for Amanda's birthday.

I think this is ample context to bring you to the last few years, where we as a team have been actively working behind the scenes to bring this new website to life. It's been a journey, and while it doesn't end here today with this new site launch, I am so proud of our team for getting this out the door and for ALWAYS thinking about you - how you will use this site, why you will use this site, each and every step of the way. I'll sign out here and say: WOW! WHAT a project this has been. I truly hope this new site brings us all together, that it serves as a useful resource to you all and that we continue to build upon it to give it some new and cool features to play with.

See you on The Shadowbox.

Hayley

......

back to me, afp.

so....over the years the team put together outline briefs to start hammering out what we needed in a new website and how it would function. there were hundreds of pages from dozens of documents and hours of phone calls that went into outlining what we needed, what was working and what we were trying to accomplish.

here's a snapshot of one document from december 2015:

like i said, there were documents and outlines upon documents and outlines. here's an updated one from a team summit (when we got the team all, or mostly, together in the same place to work IRL with one another) from may 2017 where we outlined what the photoshoot should look like...

you can also see that the plan to revamp the shadowbox was also literally years in the making, and we finally crossed that off the list earlier this year.

in the sheet above you may get a kick out of the notes "include middle finger, amanda hugging a stranger, etc."

in september 2017 the afp HQ moved into an office in brooklyn, which had white walls which i used as a backdrop with my friend and photographer kyle cassidy and he brought katelyn to help assist him.

true to the brief, we did get a shot of my middle finger:

...and a shot of me hugging a stranger (here's michael, playing the part of the "stranger")...

at this point, we envisioned the home page being a picture of me with the different navigation pages being hand drawn on my body....

i needed more navigation items than i had limbs so kyle mocked up this idea to demonstrate how we could tackle that. as you can see, this was an outline of what each section could be, before we really hammered out what to call it. the "tribe" portion was a place holder for where the community section would go. 

we shot images of every part of my body, my arms, my hands, my fingers, my legs, all front to back.

hayley and michael have got my back... literally

and we made what we call "Amanda Fucking Sans" - a font made from my handwriting. in the end, i didn't end up using it on the website itself, but to make it, i had to write out a lot of words and social logos for what would be the website menus that ended up being turned into the digital font. here i am in a sea of my handwriting on the office floor.

photo by michael mccomiskey

here is the font. BONUS!!!!: if you're in the $5+ random surprises tier, stand by, i'll be sending you a download of the font this week! YEAH. it's called "Amanda Fucking Sans".

here are some home page mock-ups made with images from this photo shoot. i wanted the site design to have a zine-like feel to it.

so. 

don't kill me (or us) that these designs all wound up on the cutting room floor.

on the other hand...if you love some of these images so much you can't stand it...maybe we can bend them into the new site. the nice thing about the new site is that EVERYTHING IS FUNGIBLE. sweeet relieeeeeiffff.

as much as i loved the photos from the shoot with kyle, once we started playing with them to mock up the website design, it became clear that this vision wouldn't pan out the way i had seen it in my mind. 

there were technical limitations with sizing the images and making sure the website was as future-proof as possible. if every time we needed to update the site, i'd need to take a new picture, it just wasn't going to work seamlessly. and i couldn't get what i saw in my head mapped out on the digital screen. so it was back to the drawing board....

again.

my true hope was to have the new website launched and ready in conjunction with the release of THERE WILL BE NO INTERMISSION but at some point in 2018 as i worked on the album and the world tour was about to start, i simply was either too busy or too uninspired to continue the creative work on it and that stalled the background work the team was doing. 

as a stop gap, we made a new landing page for the website themed around the album art, featuring the music videos and prominently displaying the world tour dates. while it's no longer the first thing you see when you type amandapalmer.net in your browser, you can still visit it, for now, at http://nointermission.amandapalmer.net

in 2019, we hit the ball rolling HARD and got back to work and we could feel the finish line being closer than ever before.

this is a good moment to single out some people from the background of team AFP who don't usually get brought on stage and clapped for: for the last seven years, the folks at fame house. they have slaved away on this site and been incredibly patient for YEARS while we've gone through all these iterations. they've been our saviors in the web department.

nick rizzuto - at fame house - along with a rotating line up of wonderful digital marketers, video editors, graphic designers, merchandise managers and social media pros. my current team over there includes nick, braxton, allie and jack. i've been working with fame house since they were a tiny company. recently, their parent company has restructured their business and because of that, we are parting ways amicably. they did a lot of work behind the scenes to help with all the patreon releases from the beginning to now and i, along with the rest of team afp, are truly grateful for their work, for their contributions to our community and for everything they did to help make this ship go. thank you nick, thank you fame house. we love you and we'll miss working with you. 

this brand new website is a beautiful way to hug goodbye as your company reformats and we part ways. thank you, thank you, thank you.

.......

so, more nerdiness.

this new site uses wordpress in a way that me and my team can directly update the site. we used to have to email someone to code in all the news updates, but now, we have the autonomy back to check under the hood and add new Things to the Thing page, news posts to the news page, shows to the shows page etc.

a peek at the site  dashboard

AND....we made a smoother experience finding ALL THREE of the online webstores, based on the territories they're located in, HOORAY.

the website, including the blog is now not only SEARCHABLE....

....but you can also view the blog and news posts in a dated ARCHIVE searching by year and month.....(HALLELJUAH)....

i even made a custom 404 error message. (a 404 error is when you try to visit a link that is broken or does not exist)

and while i'm pleased with how this site has turned out, there is still so much more we can do with it. this is just phase one. 

we are planning to add an "ask amanda" advice colum.

and we want to have a patron-only section that can use patreon log-ins so you can access patron-only stuff on the website itself. 

we want to have expansive galleries and fan art, we want it to be a hub for the podcast when it launches...you get the drift.

this is just the beginning.

the website will be a living Thing, it will be updated regularly and after this launch we'll be working on keeping the website up-to-date technology wise and information wise. 

if you see anything that feels wonky or broken, please share your feedback here, on the shadowbox. keep in mind that there are technical limitations and the design is set except for where we can customize images and text, but you never know, you may inspire a future update to make this a place that is not just informational but also FUN and FUNCTIONAL for our community.

as i said above, my hero nick rizzuto at fame house has been helping me behind the scenes since 2013 and has taken the charge to make this website exist. he'll be parting my team along with his colleagues at fame house, but this site is his swan song.

here are some words from nick:

A freshly-launched website can often feel like getting the latest model of a smartphone. When you first take it out of the box it’s new, shiny, and state-of-the-art, and you find yourself reveling in the latest doo-dads and slick features. 

Then, a few months go by... and a friend shows you the even newer model that they just picked up. You think to yourself, “Wait a minute, I didn’t know a smartphone can do that?! Why is it so much fancier than the one I have?! AGGGHHHH!!!”

In this analogy, the previous AmandaPalmer.net was an iPhone 5S and this brand new AmandaPalmer.net is something like an iPhone 15. (If you’re an android user an HTC One compared to a Google Pixel 4.)

When the previous version of AmandaPalmer.net first arrived (before my time), it had some of the latest flashy bells-and-whistles of the day, such as integrating with Amanda’s mobile app. But, true to the smartphone comparison, it wasn’t long after the previous site was launched that we started building up a wishlist of things the website might be able to do in our wildest dreams to improve the experience for the fanbase. The site was by no means “a bad website”, but unfortunately the hardware of the previous website just couldn’t support some of these things we desperately wanted. 

Unfortunately, there’s no “Apple Store for Websites” where we could just go trade it in for the newer, fancier model (trust us… we checked). Really, building a website is much more comparable to building a phone from scratch with spare parts than it is to going into a store and purchasing a phone. Because of this, it can be daunting. 

In the meantime, while we fantasized about some future new website, we attempted to make things work with a slew of stopgap solutions, including new sections of the site that were actually full websites in and of themselves. (In technical terms we call this fixing things with “bubblegum and toothpicks”.)

The first time I remember speaking with Amanda about a new version of the website was probably ~2014/2015 in the NYC Team AFP offices. I showed her and the team some references of sites out there on the internet, and we started to map out what AmandaPalmer.net 2.0 might look like based on some of our favorites. Even then, one of the key priorities was that the website be “future-proof” - meaning that no matter what new thing Amanda added to her online business (e.g., Patreon), or how technology evolved, or how the fanbase evolved, this site needed to be flexible enough to account for that. 

Then, life happened for a while, and the website didn’t. This was around the The Art of Asking era, the launch and figuring out of Patreon era, and the Ash era - there was no one thing blocking the website’s inception, just many other things rightfully demanding Amanda and the team’s time, energy, and attention. The website was a glimmer in our collective eye, but the time just wasn’t right. 

As the years went on, I personally grew more and more passionate about building Amanda and the community the best site possible. Here I was, Amanda’s “internet guy” and I knew that her main home on the internet just wasn’t everything it could be. This was a matter of personal pride! I essentially became a cartoon character with a catchphrase, predictably repeating to Team AFP any chance I got that “this would all be sooooo much better with a new website!”.

Finally, at some point in 2016, we kicked the thing off for real! 

We listed out every single page of the site, every single feature, and every single plug-in in fine detail. Amanda OK-ed our outline and the costs associated, and my incredibly talented and indefatigable colleague Sara McDougall got started on the website’s wireframes (which are essentially the blueprints of any website). 

From there the next thing to figure out was the creative direction of the site. This was the time to answer questions like:

• What colors best encompassed Amanda? Should we keep the red that had been implicitly part of her branding for years, or change course? (The answer: classic black & white, with splashes of Amanda’s favorite shade of light green.)
• What fonts should we use? Should every single piece of text on the site be written in Amanda’s handwriting? (At one point, we created a webfont based on Amanda’s handwriting for this exact purpose, but ultimately decided against this direction.)
• Should the images be hand-illustrated, or brand new photos of Amanda? How often should Amanda’s face appear on the site? Is there such a thing as too many photos of Amanda Palmer on AmandaPalmer.net?
• What’s the perfect image for fans to see when they first arrive on the site?
• How can we make sure each section of the site has its own identity without departing too far from the main branding?

Answering these and the endless other questions associated with building a website took many many discussions over several years. One such discussion that I’ll never forget took place on November 9th, 2016 (an incredibly dark day here in the U.S. due to a shadow cast by an orange cloud with fascist tendencies) where we tried our hardest to be productive but ultimately decided that this day was not the day for collaborating on a great website. 

Over the next few years there were many periods like this where the world, life, and other art simply just got in the way of pushing the site forward. 

For example, in 2019 we were hoping to finally make it happen around the release of There Will Be No Intermission, but there were so many other things that needed to get done for the album and tour that all collectively prevented that from happening. (For keen-eyed fans, you may have noticed that at this time we instead elected to prop up a brand new TWBNI landing page on the site instead of rushing to rebuild the entire thing. This is a prime example of the aforementioned bubblegum and toothpicks.)

We none-the-less slowly made progress behind-the-scenes. Then, finally, as we rolled into 2020 we determined that this year would be the year, come hell or high water (both of which did coincidentally come in 2020, mind you. Ugh). For the first time we laid out concrete plans, set rigid timelines, and recruited the exceptionally professional and efficient Tasty Studio team to help us complete the technical development. They were truly the last puzzle piece needed to do this thing properly. 

Fast-forward to today: Here we are at the end of August 2020, having first envisioned this site four-to-five years ago, finally with a brand new online home for all things Amanda Palmer. My personal white whale has finally been captured! And damn does this whale have some blubber :) 

We are all very proud of it. Please know that many people painstakingly worked to make sure that this site works for you and Amanda for years to come and that it won’t soon require a new upgrade like the latest smartphone model in my analogy. We really hope it brings you even the smallest amount of joy as you click to listen to Amanda’s music, learn about Tour dates, watch a Video, read about a Thing, or share blog posts with a friend. 

Lastly, if this whole saga wasn’t already poetic enough, I should share the additional context that after 7+ years of working together, Team Amanda and I will soon be parting ways for amicable reasons beyond any of our control. 

Working with Team Amanda to best serve you, her fans, has been a singular highlight of my career so far. I went to college to study the “music industry”, but it wasn’t until joining Team AFP that I truly and deeply learned that there would be no “industry” without the connection that art tends to inspire between an artist and the community of fans around them. It’s a sacred thing. Every countless decision I’ve seen Amanda and the team make over the years has been out of respect for this sanctity and motivated by what the fans would most enjoy. Without divulging too much of what it’s like in the belly of the beast, I can confidently tell you that this fan-first mindset is hardly common in this industry. This is a very special community for so many reasons, and it’s been beyond fulfilling to help Amanda behind-the-scenes to reach you with her art.

So, as Hayley coined, my white whale has ultimately become something of a swan song! Or you can consider it a parting gift. 

Again, I hope you enjoy. Yours in technobabble and rock & roll,

-- Nick 

.....

and now....some acknowledgements are in order.

to team afp....keeping me afloat in this sea of chaos: especially a big shout to hayley for helping guide this project along....and to michael, jordan and alex. i love you guys.

to the team at fame house:

nick rizzuto
the designer sara mcdougall
allie douglass
braxton carter
allison cohen
brittney bomberger
and everyone else who touched this project over the years

and to marcus and austin and their team at tasty studio, who did the development work coding everything together. 

THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH!!!!

and to all of you:

YOUR PATRONAGE MADE THIS SITE POSSIBLE.

there is just no way in hell that i would have been able to afford this without you.

thank you.

thank you.

thank you.

go surfing!!!!

xx

AFP

------THE NEVER-ENDING AS ALWAYS---------

IF YOU'RE IN THE USA.....DON'T FORGET TO REGISTER TO VOTE IN THE NOVEMBER 2020 ELECTION. DO NOT BE CONFUSED!!! help is there: you can register to vote, find your local voter registration deadlines, update your voter registration, check that your registration is still on the books, find your polling place and other important election information HERE at http://headcount.org

..........

1. if you’re a patron, please click through to comment on this post. at the very least, if you’ve read it, indicate that by using the heart symbol. that's always nice for me to see, so i know who's reading. 

2. see All the Things (over 100 of them) i've made so far on patreon: http://amandapalmer.net/patreon-things

3. JOIN THE SHADOWBOX COMMUNITY FORUM, find your people, and discuss everything: https://forum.theshadowbox.net/

4. new to my music and TOTALLY OVERWHELMED? TAKE A WALK THROUGH AMANDALANDA….we made a basic list of my greatest hits n stuff (at least up until a few years ago, this desperately needs updating) on this lovely page: http://amandalanda.amandapalmer.net/

5. general AFP/patreon-related questions? ask away, someone will answer: patronhelp@amandapalmer.net