Blog Post 9: My Website and Social Media Pages

Website Research

In order to create a successful and attractive website, I needed to analyse other websites to see what conventions are seen across all music creator websites.

The main conventions were:

• name and logo

• splash image

• menu bar - tour/live, music/video, merch, albums, my account, news, albums, subscribe

• newsletter sign up

• scrolling home page format.

Bruno Mars Website Analysis

Bruno Mars' Logo

Bruno Mars' website contains many conventions seen in other music artist websites, such as logo, big splash image and a menu bar. He also utilises the scrolling format of the homepage to add lots of content as if it is like a feed seen on Instagram. This is a format that my target audience of "16-25 year olds" who likely use social media like Instagram or Twitter, would be accustomed to. The format, therefore, attracts this audience as it provides a continuous stream of content.

Bruno Mars' Tour Page with the Yellow and Black Colours

A common strip on music artist websites is a tour section. This is due to artists and bands using the website as a hub to sell products around their music to the audience. Many websites will promote their new album, tour tickets or merch in order to sell to the audience. Bruno's website does this most of this on one page, giving the audience a wide range of products to choose from.

His website has got a consistent house style of a white, murky yellow and black colour scheme with modern sans serif font. He keeps this house style consistent to not confuse the viewer with a different style, and to also reinforce his brand image. This links all the webpages together to make it feel like a hub of content.

Interactivity is something that is commonly seen on Bruno Mars' website. His homepage is filled with live feeds from his Instagram and Twitter. He also uses his audience as prosumers, telling them to use the hashtag #24kmagicworldtour, which would allow audience members' posts to feature on his homepage. The interactivity is what keeps the audience engaged, even with buttons link to different websites and embedded Spotify widgets. If the audience finds it hard to navigate between pages, then it may switch off their attention.

Flat Plan

With my website, I wanted to have a clear distinction between general content like biography, single purchase and tour details separated from the extra content to create a feeling of exclusivity for the members who sign up.

In order to plan out my social media pages, I created a list of ideas for extra content, so I could make sure to cover a range of different content for my project. The main ideas were to do a podcast, interview and a behind the scenes video.

For my podcast, I took inspiration from the split-screen used on the 'Waypoint Radio Podcast'. They have a video podcast which has their logo, graphics and promotions for their other content. I plan to create create a similar template for my podcast, with a split-screen between all three of my band members.

I was inspired by the style of Taylor Swift's BTS for her song 'ME!'. In the video, it has a mix of dialogue content and action, with the song playing in the background. I will create a BTS with lots of content that were bloopers or dialogue. I will also include recordings of the recording taking place, as well as a timelapse of my shoot.