advice please on planning website...wordpress ?

[soundguy123]

Hello,

i'm going to create a website where people can buy/download musictracks (my own productions, music for corporate films, ads etc).

The idea: there's supposed to be a list of tracks with demos (play via soundcloud) and tags (and ideally can be sorted by them). These tracks can be downloaded after payment on paypal.
There should also be a customer database and some kind of leaflet to keep a preselection of tracks.

The questions:

• is it possible to realize this with wordpress ?
  I've never worked with it before...but fell in love with a template
• With wordpress, the whole site can(must?) be managed via a web-interface ?
• Or which other CMS would you suggest ?
• Is there any better way of online-payment than paypal (that works in germany) ?
• Is this whole project too much for an intermediate..should i better throw everything away
  and run home ? (and pay some professional to do it, which i can't afford unfortunately...)

thanks for any helping advice...

[mlseim]

This is a tough one to answer.

The hardest part would be the payment system ... but there are plug-ins for that ... example:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/...tal-downloads/

The demo tracks would be another thing ... maybe there is a plugin? It would have to be HTML5 audio, with a fall-back to Flash if browser doesn't support HTML5?

So the fact that there are plugins would make me say it could be done with intermediate skills. In the least, you could install WP, install your theme, do some solid setup and configuration. After that, hire a freelancer if you get stuck.

I'm curious what theme you saw that you loved.

[soundguy123]

Hi mlseim,

and thank you ! The easy-digital-download-plugin seems to be exactly what i need...can't believe this is for free...
About the audio demos - i was going to put them on soundcloud (audio hoster) and embed their (modified) flashplayer on my site. The player is quite comfortable (waveform display etc.), plus the traffic will be outsourced...or is it rather advisable to use non-flash ? Since the clientele are film-production and ad-agency guys, i guess they'll all have flash installed..?
I've also found an HTML5-based audio player plugin for wordpress (with flash-fall-back) already with a "buy" option per track. If this can be linked with the edd-plugin, this solution looks perfect.

You're right - i'll begin and dive into it.... and see how far i'll come
The theme i meant is called simple catch, nothing special, i just like the minimal design.

Thanks again, this helped a lot !

[mlseim]

Simple Catch looks nice and renders well on various devices. Anyone with an iPad, Kindle or such won't be able to use Flash, so if it has HTML5 also, you might be OK. Test it out on as many devices as you can. I don't have any experience with soundcloud.