Designing and Producing a Website for a New Band Planning and Designing your production

Stage 1: Genre  You must decide upon the genre of music and its audience  Your research will have been centred on this genre  You will know the conventions used in this genre  You will know the methods used to target the audience

Stage 2: Content  You will first have to decide upon the content that you will include in your site  This will depend upon the generic conventions of the site and the target audience but might include some or all of the following:

Content List  Samples of audio tracks  Behind-the-scenes videos (only for website release)  News of the band  Tour dates  Reviews of recent concerts  Fan zone (for fans to communicate to band and for insider information)  Biographies  Discography  News of TV/personal appearances  Games  Animations  Artwork by the band  Gallery of photographs  Concert photos  Behind-the-scene photos  Message board for fans to communicate with fans  Merchandise for sale  CDs/DVDs  Interview tracks (audio & video)  Posters  T-shirts/caps/clothing  Books  Mugs  Badges & novelties  Links to other similar bands or ‘friends’ (i.e. same label)

Stage 3: USP  The USP or Unique Selling Point is vital  Why are fans of this band going to come to your site  Why are fans of this band going to return again and again to this site?  The concept of ‘ stickiness ’ is key here; you need to make visitors stick around and return as if they were stuck to the site  You need to make them not just fans of the band but fans of the site  How are you going to achieve this?

Stage 4: Target Audience and ‘stickiness’  ‘Content is king’ is a relatively old cliché for websites  If you don’t have constantly changing and updated content then why should visitors bother to return?  Interactivity: you need to make your visitors included in your site and interactivity of some sort is vital  Ease of use (or functionality!): if it’s easy to find what you want, then visitors will enjoy the experience  Design, colour scheme and layout: it must also be aesthetically pleasing; who wants to go back to a poorly designed, badly planned site?  USP: what is yours? How is your site different to or better than others?

Stage 5: Design thoughts  You should start gathering together pictures, pages from magazines and print- outs from websites to help you start your design decisions  Annotate these and put them in your notebook  Start sketching designs of what your pages are going to look like  Draw designs of photographs you are going to take  Take some test photos (and always keep a copy of them)  Do some experiments in Photoshop with some of these (and keep copies of all the stages)  Design some CD covers  Take some practice video footage (and keep the original unedited version)  Sketch ideas for logos for the band to convey their band/brand image  Print out some different type-faces to experiment with the typography  Suggest possible structures for your site  For all these experiments, annotate them and suggest reasons why they work (or not) and how they work (or not) and suggest reasons for changes and improvements  Keep a detailed record of all decisions/revisions/changes and reasons for them  This will all go into your notebook to build up to a comprehensive record of the decisions and revisions that you have made during your project  This will be a big part of the mark given to your final coursework (25%)

Conclusions  You should be starting work on this now  Your deadline is about half-term in the Spring Term for your whole project to be finished  You will have a day in January where you will be taken out of lessons to work on your website; your aim is to finish your site that day  Each individual element should have detailed care and attention paid to it  Planning and forward thinking are vital before you start the actual work; making changes after you have started can be very, very time-consuming  Get help at all stages from not only Simon, Matt and me, but also any member of the Media Department (although probably not very technical help!)  For technical help: Simon for Photoshop; Matt for Flash; Charles for DreamWeaver (but all of us can do all these things to some extent)  Still and video cameras from Matt/Simon (and booking of the photo studio)  Tell your friends about your plans (they might be your target audience) and listen (and note) their comments