Task 1 - Website Conventions

Over the past month we began making websites for our artist. We made a final website when we got our feedback from our teacher from two other websites. The first two websites were completely improvised and were made before the shoot days of our video. This gave us little knowledge of how we wanted to present our band as we didn't start evaluating generic website conventions of alt.rock artists. Alex mainly focused on the websites and I didn't put in my input, this lead to very unprofessional looking pages with several irregularities and no similarities to any other rock artist. Alternative artists websites are always shown as being very simple and generic with only few features that make them stand out massively such as the logo or a taster video. Although they do not reject modern technologies, they do not pamper themselves like synthetic artists who have websites with bright colors and fancy animations. Secondly alternative rock artists who debut, are not financial giants so advertising is key, so its tradition to sell themselves on their website however big they are. This generally done through a shop or through selling tickets for an upcoming gig. Many alt.rock artists also give away freebies to avoid the audience going to competitors to consume their products. This has lead towards free streaming on websites and some artists let consumers listen to a song or two, to drive them to buy and album etc. These conventions drove us to making a final website that was based on other references to rock websites, in which we took inspiration from and didn't go ahead and improvise.

The Home Page - The original home page from the other websites featured a large wide shot photo of the band itself that took up half the page and was just the album cover photo in a different colour and different font placement. We decided to change the home page by not having the band's image but featuring the artists debut music video as a way of introducing us as a band, giving audiences a better insight into who The Walls are. The colour scheme chosen is very simple but professional as we look like an authentic band which connotes rebelliousness and nostalgia of the past rock music. We even added a video in the background to show how we are a committed band who like to give our audience regular updates of our music production. Not only does the video show us as being committed and organic but it also shows how we are in favor of modern technologies and that we like to mix up a bit of everything to reach a larger amount of customers. We also added a link to our new album on the newsfeed side as it gives viewers an opportunity to listen to the music and potentially generate revenue. As we are an organic band we also want to connect with our fans so we don't want to force updates onto fans but give them an opportunity to connect through social media links.

Band Members - As we are a band, we didn't want to write a long paragraph as a biography as it would just bore customers, so we decided to split us up and have small paragraphs on each band member so that fans get an insight in us as just normal people. We didn't do a photoshoot for the band as that would of shown them as having loads of money, so we just took in the moment shots that were from different times during the production. We decided to include a few instruments for the drummer and bass guitarist to show how we are organic and our star image within the performance element.

Streaming - We wanted to give fans an opportunity to listen to our song without the video as it is already up on YouTube free of charge, hopefully it will encourage them to click the orange '£9.99' button so that they pay to listen to more.

Merchandise - Originally we had no merchandise on the the other websites, but as we have now tried to adhere to generic alt.rock conventions we decided to place a few items to help gain an audience. Simple cotton wear such as t-shirts and jumpers were made on word and photoshop to make them look as real as possible.

Contact and Tour Dates - Our contact page has a different background which shows that it's the more serious side of the website to do with the admin and we thought that a brick wall would be the most original and authentic background as it acts ironic towards the band. We also setup an email text box so people can message us directly from the website in which they would hope replies would come in as soon as possible. This is very common for upcoming artists as they heavily depend on any feedback or any record label approaches. Therefore it is important for everyone to be able to contact the artist. We also added some gig dates in which we used the word 'gig' rather than 'tour' as we aren't financially able to play in big venues for a long period of time. However people may find that these venues are too big for an artist like us, however they are small rooms that these academies own so it gains a hype for the location as it involves big company names.

Inspirations - We were inspired by several websites such as Stereophonics, Radiohead and The Killers.  They are all alternative rock artists who started up the same way we did and sold themselves through the organic ways such as bar gigs. Here are their websites:

http://www.stereophonics.com/

http://www.radiohead.com/deadairspace

http://www.thekillersmusic.com/

They all include everything that we aimed to include within our website such as a contact page, a store, a media page etc. We tried to adhere to the most simplistic conventions that create the authentic feel from an organic artists website, without adding too much to make it stand out like a piece of cake.