Band Website vs. Band Festival Website

A band website is meant to be personalized.  It is like an album cover.  The design is meant to set the mood and prepare the viewer for the type of music they are about to hear.  I designed a website recently for the band Like It Was.  Their tagline: “Long Island group playing Classic Rock the way it OUGHTA BE….Like it was!”.  What things come to mind when I am presented with a band like this?  Well classic rock to me means Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Eric Clapton.  The time period- groovy late 1960′s to mid 1970′s.  The visuals- colorful swirls, lava lamps, and black lights.  What I came up with is (www.likeitwasband.com).  The inner pages display the expected information of any band site such as the songs they play, videos of them performing, and at what upcoming gigs they can be seen.

A band festival, or music festival, is meant to be more for the attendees.  They will need to know the who, what, when, why, where of the festival.  They will also need to know answers to some frequently asked questions such as is this event dog friendly? kid friendly? And they will probably want to see past photos from previous years to verify that this is a type of event that they would like to experience.  The design of the website is not to be personalized by one headlining band, but more-so by the overall genre of all the participating musicians.  It must also be generalized enough to not put off any one type of user may not be familiar with any of the bands but is still looking to have a good time.  In this website I did for the Cedar Beach Blues & Roots Festival: (www.cedarbeachblues.com) the participating bands range from rock, blues, jazz, and funk.  Obviously these genres are very ranged in sound, but they all echo a similar feeling of ‘old school’ and ‘going back to your roots’.

I’d say the main difference between the two types of websites is the time era.  Although both sites are promoting bands that play a musiical feel from decades ago, they each have want to portray a certain look .  LikeItWas has a more grungy, more ‘grassroots’ type feel to emphasize their origin.  CedarBeachBlues has a more clean, more modern look to emphasize the fact that this is a new and upcoming festival.

The main similarity of course is the photos.  The more photos the better.  Although music is heard with the ears, the energy can still visually communited through a computer screen.