Web page research - Style

Part of this project, I am required to design a website for my band. This is required because websites are very useful in terms of promotion. Before I design my website for my album, I need to gather research that will give me ideas in-terms of visual style and navigation. The band that I am creating the music video for is Milburn, so I will analyse 5 similar bands in-terms of genre and compare them later.

Arctic Monkeys - (http://www.arcticmonkeys.com/)

I will first start by analysing the website for the Arctic Monkeys. They are a good starting point because they have a similar music style to Milburn, they also come from the same city of Sheffield and are currently one of the most recognizable bands in the country. I think it is also relevant to start with them as I am taking a slightly same approach to my style of video as they do, these styles can be seen in a previous post that I have completed.

The Screenshot to the left shows the general home page for the bands website. The first notable style of the website seems to generally use the colours of black and white ( black for the background,white for he text. Firstly this is a smart way of separating the text and backgrounds so the viewer knows what is going on on-screen. However i think the main reason this is used is that many elements of the bands new album consist of black and white styles. 

This can be seen firstly with the Album cover for 'AM'. The cover has the same
colours white and black, it also implicates a white zig zag line which can be seen on the home page of the website.

This can be seen in a music video by the band for the song 'do I wanna know'. The video shows a black background with a white guitar string that is in sync with the music.

As you can see from the above, the Arctic Monkeys have started a theme that can be seen throughout their work. They use a range of blacks and whites that are easily recognizable to the audience, so when they see this style they will know it is something to do with the band. This could be a style that I implement on my website, for example i could take a certain aspect from my video and implement it into my webpage and digipak.

Navigation

The navigation on the Arctic Monkeys site is rather simple, but simple is sometimes good for a web page as some web users may struggle to use complicated sites if they are not used to using the internet. Their site is very simple to use and the most inexperienced person on the internet should mange when browsing the site.

The above screenshot, shows the simple navigation bar that can be seen at the top of the Arctic Monkeys website. This is the main bar that allows the user to browse through the main pages. over navigation on the pages includes links to pacific pages, for example if one was on the releases page, there is a list of albums/singles that have been released by the band, if the user clicks on one of these, they will be taken to a separate page that details the album/single. This can be seen throughout the main pages with video, pictures and much more.

The above shows the gig link at the top of the page. When not highlighted, the link remains black (left). However when the browser highlights the link, it changes to white (right), this can be seen above. this is an interesting way of making the page interactive to the audiences. It has also kept to the black and white theme that the Arctic monkeys are currently using throughout their work.

The Strokes

This style of navigation could be useful to use for my webpage design. Keeping the navigation simple will attract more of a broad audience increasing the popularity of the webpage. I also like the colour change when the navigation is highlighted. However i would use a range of colour to make the page more stylish and interesting.

The next website that I will annotate is the band the strokes. This band is also similar to Milburn and the Arctic Monkeys, so I think it would be a good idea to research websites that are the same genre of music. First I have taken a screenshot of the homepage of the website. This is the first page the audience see when they enter the site.

The home page uses only three types of colours, red for the background, which is very eye-catching for the audience. Black is used for some of the text present, this is the banner "home" this shows the audience which page they are on. black is also used to highlight the title of the band in the top left "the strokes". Like the Arctic Monkeys the strokes site share themes that can be seen throughout the latest work.

The website shares the same colours and names as the album design. This is a common convention that artists use in the work. It allows the audience to recognise an artist work, for example if a user saw the strokes website and then the album, they would beadle to easily tell that the album and website are linked.