We looked through some websites for artists or bands that carry a similar target audience to Snow Patrol including Snow Patrol's own site to find out what elements make a good Internet site. By spotting themes or traits which are similar in a range of Indie artists' websites, we would gain a better understanding of what makes an artists' website grabbing, successful and effective.
After analysing the band sites of, Elbow, Coldplay, Radio Head, Biffy Clyro, and Kings of Leon we depicted several key features that was apparent on each site.
With the exception to the Kings of Leon's site, all other websites used predominantly dark colours as the background for their pages. Even though the Kings of Leon did not use colours as dark as the others, it still could not be described as vibrant. Black and grey were the most frequent colours used on each website and was often supplemented by colours such as reds and browns. It could be said it reflects the image the band are trying to promote and the themes introduced in their music - moody, different, gloomy...
Headings and Pages
Several common key pages branch off from the main site on the band websites. Examples of this include, Interviews, Forums, Gig Dates, Merchandise and Gallery.
The idea of this is to give fans any additional information they want about the band, which of course crafts and image of the band to the consumer. Information, gig dates, and forums not only give the audience an entertainment factor but make each band appear more credible. These additional pages usually found of the main homepage, are either located at the top of the site on a navigation bar, or down the side vertically for easy to use access by users.
Text used - Fonts, Style, Size
Each site obviously uses slightly different font types, however each use a similar idea of contrasting colours and solid, block-like writing for headings. The contrasting colours (usually white) make navigating the website much easier as headings and text stand out and are easy to read. Fonts follow a standard sans serif format so the eye can follow the text with ease.
Bad Site
A good example of a bad website is Coldplay's site. The colour scheme is hard to read and the site is generally hard to navigate due to the random layout. It does not follow the scheme common in the other band sites such as bold, clear titles and an easy to navigate side/top bar. However again the dark colours are incorporated once more on this website, as are in the others.
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