Website Design Planning: Initial Ideas

To start coming up with ideas for our website, we looked back at our website influences posts and chose ones that we still liked to take influence from.

The 1975

We liked the way the 1975 presented their links, whilst keeping with the colour scheme

Dog Is Dead

We liked the landing page of the Dog Is Dead page

Dan Croll

We liked the simplicity and strong colour scheme within the Dan Croll page

Another page I found recently that we all like is the Rizzle Kicks' page:

We liked the non-linear format of the posts, and that the social media links are linked in with news from the band. We also liked the way the social media links were presented as icons in the top centre of the page. Also we liked the colour scheme of the whole page.

First flatplan of our website homepage

From looking at these other websites, we had a rough idea of how we wanted our page to look. I sketched out a simple flatplan of the homepage, where I tried to clearly convey genre and conventions.

I included key conventions such as the band logo, clear social media links and easy navigation. Features we agreed on that are not on the flatplan are a clear colour scheme (blue, white, grey and black) and a simple sans-serif font. The navigation buttons across the top are the conventional ones, we also decided to include a page for users to download a free track from the album ('Free EP'), which was influenced from Dog Is Dead's website.

We wanted the homepage to be a hub for all the social media feeds to come together, showing all of the updates of the band in one place. We will have social media posts from Facebook, tweets from Twitter, photos from Instagram, music to listen to from Soundcloud and Spotify, videos to watch from Youtube and music to purchase from Amazon and Itunes. Each of the posts will have the social media icon at the top of the post, directing the user straight to the social media page. We did this because we wanted the page to be very visual and interactive, plus we wanted our social media pages to be easily accessible.

Gavin created a video of himself navigating around a very early version of our website. It shows off the general layout we were going for of, the non-linear format of the posts, along with the navigation bar, band logo across the top and linked social media icons. We will change the colour scheme and background to match the band's debut album.