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.

The second main issue I find with older websites is that they are often overly cluttered. Buttons were bigger, ads were bigger, and a lot of unnecessary elements are placed on the pages such as a overwhelming “shop now” button in the header of an e-commerce site when ‘shopping’ is clearly implied. Why so much clutter? When websites were first becoming popular to household users, much of the things we take for granted on the screen did not yet exist. For example, the main navigation always being on top, buttons being rolled over to create a drop-down menu, and font styles being varied to differentiate links from regular text are all simple web “rules” that did not exist at the birth of web design. So instead websites were built to show everything all at once rather than hiding everything in a clean and simple website yet can still allowing the content to be easily found.

A website’s main purpose is to display information to a user, but of course this information must be presented as intriguing to the user and that’s where design comes in. It’s that balance of intrigue and practicality that makes a good design.