A-Ha – Digital Web Agency, London

A-ha are an internationally renowned pop trio, selling 35 million+ records and winning countless awards for their music and innovative videos.

The band was founded in 1982 by Morten Harket (vocals), Magne Furuholmen (keyboards), and Paul Waaktaar-Savoy (guitars).

Aspire was commissioned to design and build the new a-ha website at the start of 2010. The brief was to celebrate a-ha's twenty five years in the music business.

The band have a worldwide fan base, which meant implementing nine different versions of the news section for all the various languages.

Aspire created multi-level admin permissions for the content management system, which allowed the various translators to login and update the site from around the world.

Aspire tackled the challenge of integrating the sheer volume of information required on the site, alongside creating a design for easy navigation.

With 2010 being a-ha's final year, a fan area was built, where memories and photos can be uploaded and shared to commemorate the band.

Multiple custom plugins and technical innovations were also carried out in the build process; such as the tour module which powers the countdown for the live performances, the fan content/area module, newsletter sign-up/database integration, and many more.

Aspire also designed the visual styling for the band's MySpace and Twitter pages, and provided technical support for a-ha's management team.

We approached Aspire with the need to totally redo the a-ha website and to pull across ten years of news articles to a new system.

We were amazed with the improvements and additions they worked so hard on, these make the new website easy to use and navigate.

We are extremely happy with how the new site turned out, and heard the fans are too! Harald Wiik - a-ha Manager