Our Website - Initial Design

We wanted to finish our album cover before we started working on our website since we planned to base the design of the website on the cover artwork. We were nearing our final album cover design so we started working on our website. The images below are from websites that were particularly inspiring in some way.

We liked the social media icons on the website for 'The 1975'.

We thought a landing page like the one on the 'Dog Is Dead' website was a good idea.
We also liked the strong colour scheme and the use of texture throughout.

The way posts from different social media sites were presented on one page inspired us.
We also liked the colour scheme and the simple layout.

Again, the simplicity was something we liked a lot, as well as the colour scheme.

 Based on the above websites and on previous website research, we knew we wanted a pretty simple website with a clear sense of genre. Alice sketched out this initial design. Some of the key features are the band logo, social media icons and navigation buttons at the top of every page, as well as the simple layout and sans-serif fonts. The main page collects together feeds from different social media pages for the band like Facebook and Twitter, displaying them all in one place. The page will be very visual with plenty of images and videos. Another key idea was to have a small icon at the top of each post to show where the media is linked from and the ability to click this icon to view the post in more detail on the original social media site it was posted and view comments or related content. Having the social media icons at the top allows fans to access more of what they want easily, be it Youtube videos or behind-the-scenes Instagram pictures.

This is a video of me exploring a very early version of our website. It shows the overall layout of the page as well as how some of the features that the user can access. The navigation bar at the top has all of the different sections of the website that can we accessed. Below it are the simple social media icons that Alice created in Photoshop. In the main section of the page you can see a picture that has been embedded from Instagram as well as an embedded Youtube video and tweet. Clicking the Instagram picture takes the user to the original post on the Instagram website where they can comment on the picture and interact with other fans.

This is only a very early version of the website but I wanted to capture it so that it is clear how development of the website progresses. We will probably change almost everything about the page in some way by the time we reach our final webpage but the overall functionality will hopefully not be too different as we like the simplicity of the layout and how the home page works, bringing together different social media websites into one main hub.