Joe's Blog

My next few blogs, I will discuss the different aspects of my first assignment on interface design. I hope to show my progression and the reasoning behind each of the choices I will make.

I have choosen to design a website on one of my favourite music artists. An unofficial fansite of Radiohead. It was a toss up between Velvet Underground and Radiohead, but I chose the Oxford outfit because I have been listening to them a lot recently and they are still together unlike VU, so I will have more updates to post on the site when I get to that stage.

To begin with I researched other radiohead fansites.

greenplastic.com

http://www.ateaseweb.com/

There were more than I had expected, but of course Radiohead are such a massive band with a huge cult following, in all four corners of the globe. In fact, a Google search for the term “radiohead fan site” brought about 355,000 results.

I must take into account their style of music, image and attitudes. In particular Thom Yorke (lead singer) is a strong environmentalist.

My audience is obviously fans of the band, most specifically English speaking ones. I noticed that the fansite greenplastic.com is done by an American and therefore the news post contains infomation that is more relevant to fans living in America (eg news of Thoms recent solo gigs in LA). My site will be better catered for the English fan. Therefore my audience is English fans.

My site will contain-

A news post about what the band are doing musically and as solo artists, and any gigs they are playing.

A discography, showing all the bands albums/covers/lyrics.

A section containing information about the band and how they have progressed over the years.

Also, a few articles on how the albums have influenced my life and my review and thoughts about the album/song

Recently our class compared and analysed 3 different websites. They were the online entertainment shops – Amazon, Play and HMV. We looked particually at the design of the site and its usability.

The designers of the websites are obviously aware of their competitors websites and I found it interesting how this affected their design choices. In todays internet-based market, it is essencial for a firms website to be easy to use for the consumer. It is also important to have a site that is up to date with the latest interactive software and website design fashions.

Starting with amazon – I found it easy to use and welcoming. However I am very familiar to the site, so a new user may have a difference experience. It has a consistent colour scheme with white in the background and a blue nav bar. The logo is situated in the top left corner and is a link to the homepage. The nav bar is simple and displays links to the different departments, which when scrolled over with the mouse opens up another box with more specific catergories – this is very useful for quick searching. Also the site has a search bar along the top and links to “my account” and “shopping cart”. The site is very long and displays links to deals and some of the products that are availible.

Play is a slightly different story. I am also very familiar with this website and find it easy to use and get around. Play has a large orange nav bar along the top with new boxes that open with more product categories when scrolled over. Immediatly it is obvious that Play is much more colourful than Amazon. The colour scheme is orange, white with some grey. There is a search bar along the top and the logo is displayed in the top left as with Amazon. Play website gives the impression that they have a smaller target audience. The site feels more masculine than Amazon. Amazon had a more universal feel to it, due to the white colour scheme and almost blandness.

The last site was HMV. Its colours were more striking than the other two sites, with contrasting pink and black. It definatly has a masculinity to it – this gives a strong indication of their target audience. The layout is pretty identical to Play, with the nav bar along the top and a search bar just above it. The logo is in the top left hand corner as with all the websites. There is a selection of the available products on show down the centre as with play. It almost seems as if Play and HMV were made by the same designer and/or the same template was used but with font/colours etc changed.

It seemed Amazon was the site that was most different to the other two. Its simple design and “bland” look gives it a feel of a website that has been designed with less effort than the others. Almost as if less money was spent on the site design, however Amazon is the most successful online store out of the 3. I believe this has been cleverly employed to give the brand and website a sence of “cheapness”, a sence that its products’ are cheaper than others and have been marked up less. This is a similar technique that brands like Tesco use to sell their Value range. The packaging has plain colours and simple designs – no fancy fonts or images that will make the product seem like it is expensive and therefore possibly overpriced.

I found this exercise interesting and stimulating. It helped me look at websites from a website designers perspective, rather than a consumers.

The founder of the Internet was an Englishman. Tim Berners-Lee was born in London, England and graduated in Physics from Oxford University in 1976. He was a vital member of the team that developed the World Wide Web, the defining of HTML used to create web pages, URLs and HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol).

Another person who was important in its development was Vinton Cerf. He took ten years out of high school to work on the web. He begun co-designing and co-developing the protocols and structure of what became the Internet.

Before the internet went public, a forerunner called ARPAnet or Advanced Research Projects Agency Network was launched. ARPAnet was funded by the United States military after the cold war with the aim of having a military command and control center that could withstand nuclear attack. The point was to distribute information between computers in different areas. ARPAnet created the TCP/IP communications standard, which defines data transfer on the Internet today. The ARPAnet opened in 1969 and was quickly usurped by civilian computer nerds who had now found a way to share the few great computers that existed at that time.

Four computers were the first connected in the original ARPAnet. They were located in the respective computer research labs of UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah.

Below is a link for a very useful timeline of the web

Internet History Timeline