David Emery OnlinePrint Isn't Dead
25 July 2009
A couple of months ago the lovely folk from .net magazine dropped me a line and asked if I’d like to take part in their ‘build-off’, which this month was on unsigned bands websites. Sure enough, I said yes and if you turn to page 95 of the current issue you’ll be able to see my ugly mug.
The idea behind the build-off is that they get 3 people to do a design for a brief, and expound upon the reasons behind all their choices. I thought it might be useful to share my solution with you lot as well – hopefully it might be useful for someone.
Gone are the days where if you were an unsigned band it was good enough just to have a MySpace page. Sure, they’re still useful but as more and more people migrate to different social networks (like Facebook and Twitter) having a decent website that acts as a ‘hub’ into all your disparate online presences makes ever increasing sense.
The key focus of the design – for the fictional band ‘The Electric’ – is to get information across as quickly as possible. You’re competing against a flood of other bands vying for attention, so there’s no time for things like flashy intros or ‘interesting’ navigation concepts; it needs to be straight and to the point. Similarly, the last thing you need to worry about is piracy or trying to keep a tight leash on your music – what you want to do is enable as many people to hear you as possible, so having some form of music player on your website is a must (and make the audio decent quality as well). Allowing people to embed the tracks on their website or MySpace is another good idea – if people are into your music you want to make sure they’ve got the tools to help spread the word.
The other key tool – although a little old school – is building up a decent mailing list. It’s the best way of having a direct communication with your key fans, so the sign-up box gets primary placement next to the logo. To motivate people to sign-up it’s also good to give them an incentive – in this case a free MP3.
1. The Stream:
This aggregates together all the activities on other sites – like Twitter updates – as well as latest news and blog posts, so that the homepage is always fresh.
2. Music Player:
Probably the only use of Flash on the page would be for the music player, which would have the added bonus of making it easy to give out YouTube-style embed code.
3. Comments:
Before you’ve built up a big fanbase a forum would be overkill, but making it so people can comment on almost everything on the site works very nicely instead.
4. Photos:
Bringing in photos from your Flickr group gives fans an easy way of posting content to the site without having to spend too much time or money on development.
5. Tour dates:
It’s key to get people down to your gigs, so making them prominent on the site is important. Also, at this stage ecommerce is unnecessarily complicated, so driving people to buy things at shows is the way to go.
6. Facebook:
It’s quite easy to add integration with Facebook to a site, and makes it simple for your fans to start spreading the word to their online friends.