What the Folk!
For those who are unaware, Sherry runs the fantastic and popular Flight of the Conchords fan site – What the Folk!. Sherry has been posting news and Folking out with the Conchords since 2002.
What the Folk! has come a long way since the early days. Back then, there were only a few pages, and Comic Sans was the main font! I’ve been slowly working on a new design based around WordPress to alleviate some of the pain that Sherry faces every time she updates. Dreamweaver running inside a virtual machine in Linux = teh bad. Hopefully we can make everything live sometime later this year.
For literally any information about Bret, Jemaine, the Conchords, and their other projects, What the Folk! is the place to be. The site has always been very popular. Since their television show began airing earlier in the year, the traffic to the site has increased a lot, and we get many many thousands of unique hits every day. The bandwidth used is well up in the hundreds of gigabytes every month, and for that we have to thank Lunarpages for never falling over.
Sherry had never wanted to make any money from the website, but a couple of months ago I convinced her to add some very basic Google ads so that we could recoup something for the huge amount of time and effort that we both put in to keeping the site running (well, she does most of the work. I just tinker and facilitate her work here and there when required 
. We also started selling some What the Folk! tshirts, which have been a HUGE success.
We pondered getting tshirts printed locally and then shipping them ourselves, but the up front cost and the lack of flexibility didn’t make this sound very appealing. Instead, we went with Spreadshirt. Spreadshirt lets you upload your own designs and put them in your own online store. They then do all the work printing and shipping the shirts, before paying you a commission (that you set) at the end. All you have to do is attract people to the store to buy them.
Spreadshirt have been excellent, and not having to worry about stock levels, and having the flexibility to quickly create and change and add and remove designs is great.
I’m not even close to a designer, and my skills with Adobe Illustrator are way down at the Zero end of the spectrum, but I did manage, with the help of a good friend (who is at the complete other end of the design spectrum to me), to complete couple of designs.
Our main tshirt is the wonderfully named “Bit of an Arty Effort Tee”, shown above in the green ringer style.
If you have heard the Conchords sing Humans are Dead, you may be familiar with their binary solo, which I turned into some What the Folk! shirts. One of the shirt designs has the actual binary solo (0000001, 00000011) on the back. The other has “Flight of the Conchords” written in Binary. Amazing!
Now, the even more amazing thing is that last month Spreadshirt began what they are calling their “Design of the Month”. They have moved into a new building, they have a kiosk set up in the entry way, and they wanted to decorate it with the most popular tshirts from the proceeding month.
Well what do you know. Our “Bit of an Arty Effort Tee” was the most popular design and won the Design of the Month award. That’s right. I, with no design talent whatsoever, won a design award!
Ha!
So, if you’re interested in finding out more about the Flight of the Conchords, you know where to go.
