Construction Post 6: Website Post-production

To create our website we used the Wix.com development platform, allowing users to make their own HTML5 websites. This was very easy to use and had many different layouts for us to choose from.

We were given a sheet with all of the neccessary information for how to use Wix on it.

The primary thing we did after creating our website was choose a colour scheme. Although many websites often have a white background we thought that black would suit our genre more and would not detract attention from the features of our page by having an image as the background.

Alistair and I working on the website.

We added in the buttons for our web page in order to make it as easy to use as possible. The font was made white to contrast with the dark background and it was also different to 'Come What May' so it was easy for our viewers to differentiate between the buttons and the title of the website.





 I was particularly inspired by Catfish and The Bottlemen as their black and white style was simplistic yet very effective and connoted their genre well.

Once entering our website we took inspiration from Arctic Monkey's homepage so that the audience was immediately granted with the opportunity to buy the album and watch our latest music video. However, we wanted our page to be easier to navigate so made our buttons much larger and clearer.

Two issues Alistair and I were discussing before any audience feedback were that we firstly thought that all our photos should be in black and white - in particular, I'm referring to on our News page as this seemed to fit our theme better and create synergy across all of our platforms.

We looked at other News pages for influence and found that signings were very common.


After looking at Panic! At the Disco's News page I thought that adding a festive photo of some of our band members would be a nice touch and make our website more interactive with our audience.

An alternative, upcoming rock band called Against the Current often put videos on their website advertising their upcoming tours and albums etc. so I thought this would be a cool thing to add to our website.


Originally I was unsure of whether it looked strange to only have three of our band members in our video but one of our teachers said that this was fine and said that band's often don't always have all members doing the announcements.

I then went to get target audience feedback from people and was very pleased to discover that our genre was very evident as 90% of the poeple I asked guessed that it was a rock band and the other 10% suggested that it was a punk band.

Some repetitive comments were..
- Our font was quite thin and didn't capture their attention enough.
- Our website was very visual which was good but maybe we should add more colour to our website. However I am unsure of this idea as it may contradict our theme.
- Everybody really liked our logo and thought the enter page was really cool and a common convention which they expected to see.

After hearing that many people were unsure of our font I googled some different fonts and found the ones to the left. None of my group members were particularly keen on these fonts but we were able to take inspiration from them. The Enter Page immediately connoted our genre and anchored our brand identity.

The changes I made to the Enter page.

After developing the website further, for example by adding information about the tour on the Home page, I sent links of the website to two people and asked for their opinions on it.

Both of them liked the website and the theme was evident but their two main criticisms were:

1) There was nothing live on the blog - this inspired me to try and find a timer to countdown to the album release date which Alistair then added in. Henry Jenkins' ideas on Participatory culture highlighted the importance of interactivity for our audience.

2) There was no link to buy tickets but thsi was fairly simple to add in as we had done something similar for our sign up to a news letter. 

Once we were in the final stages of the website I decided to create a video of feedback from our audience whilst viewing the website. I tried to get a range of genders and ages.



I was incredibly happy with the feedback as adding the timer was clearly a good improvement and was mentioned as being a 'cool' feature. Another feature that was particularly liked was the gallery.

When opening Wix you had a selection of gallery designs to choose from, shown to the left.

I particularly liked the 3D design as it spun around and I thought it was quite quirky and unique however our teachers said that we had to choose from one design and as the other members of my group thought that we should go for something more simplistic we decided to use a different layout.










The other major feedback we received from our teachers was to edit our photos on our Band page to make them look more professional as the backgrounds for each photo was different as you can see below. I thought it was important to include a Band Page as according to Blumer and Katz' theory, the audience will want to information about the band to have a diversion from their own lives and see the lives of the band.

Editing the photos was a very time-consumin gprocess but once I figured out how to do it, it was nto particularly complicated. Below I have created a flow chart demonstrating what I did. 

On this band page I was also responsible for writing the bio for each individual band member. I found this task really interesting as I was able to create personas for each member. This then led me to make sure that this characterisation was synergistic across all our website pages, hence why I made sure that we included behind the scenes videos to show our band having fun and messing about. From my audience feedback i also found that this made most of them laugh and gave our band a more fun approach which they liked.