WEBSITE CONVENTIONS FOR ARTISTS OF THE DANCE GENRE

And how we applied these to Lucid City’s website

BASIC CONVENTIONS

We followed most conventions of music websites when creating the website for Lucid City, while also challenging some. I have demonstrated how we did this in this presentation with comparisons of our website to the websites of dance artists including Sub Focus, Clean Bandit, Disclosure, Chase & Status, and Wilkinson.

LANDING PAGE

Disclosure have a landing page, which is what visitors are taken to before they can access the full website. A landing page is conventional, and is often used to advertise a product and/or the artist’s social media.

We decided to add a landing page to Lucid City’s website to follow this convention, and have advertised both the album and the social media pages of the artist on it, as well as a . This combined opportunities to interact and opportunities to purchase the product.

BANNER

Many artist websites use a banner across the top of the page of the artist’s name or logo. For example, Sub Focus has a banner of his name across the top of his website. We have followed this convention by having the artist’s name and powder paint logo as a banner across the top of each page of our website.

Our banner:

MENU BAR

The menu bar is typically across the top of the page, such as on Clean Bandit’s website. We placed our menu bar across the top of each page on our website in keeping with this convention.

The menu bar on Lucid City’s website:

NEWS

We included a ‘news’ page as bands and artists often have this page to keep their fans updated on what they’re up to, when new music is available, and inform them of purchasing opportunities they might be interested in.

Clean Bandit’s News page:Our News page:

ABOUT

We created an about page for each member of Lucid City, which could either be accessed from one main about page or from a drop-down menu from the main menu bar. We did this as, shown by Chase & Status’s website, an ‘about’ page is a common feature of artist websites.

GALLERY

We conformed to the convention of having a page of photos of the artist. Similar to Sub Focus, we divided our ‘gallery’ page into different sections.

Sub Focus’s ‘gallery’ page

VIDEOS

Although many websites have a page specifically for videos, we challenged this by distributing our videos across the website as we felt that it fitted better with the layout of our website. This convention is followed on websites of artists such as Chase & Status.

MUSIC

A ‘music’ page is conventional of any band or artist website, and so we followed this convention with our own website.

Artists such as Clean Bandit use Soundcloud files on their music page, which is what we also used on our website as a player for ‘My Head is a Jungle’. In addition to this, we embedded the Youtube video for the single and placed an advertisement for the album on this page.

Clean Bandit’s ‘music’ page:A Soundcloud file on our ‘music’ page:

The Youtube video for the single An advertisement for the album

TOUR

We followed the convention of having a ‘tour’ page (sometimes called ‘live’ or ‘gigs’). This is where all the upcoming dates for concerts are displayed.

Sub Focus’s Tour page: Our Tour page:

STORE

A ‘store’ page is a common convention of band and artist websites, as it provides the visitor with more purchasing opportunities and optimises their profits. Artists such as Disclosure have included this page in their website. We conformed to this convention.

Disclosure’s Store page:

Our Store page:

CONTACT

A ‘contact’ page is a convention of websites, used by artists such as Sub Focus. We conformed to this convention, providing contact details for both fan mail and business enquiries.

Sub Focus’s Contact page:

Elements of our Contact page:

SYNERGY

A convention of not just the dance genre but all genres is to produce a website in keeping with the theme of the artist’s latest release. Two examples of this are Wilkinson’s website, whose banner uses the same graphics as his latest single ‘Hit the Floor’, and Disclosure’s website, whose website has the same colour scheme as their latest album ‘Settle’. This helps to create synergy between the artist’s products, which then adds to the overall branding of the artist.

SYNERGY

We also created synergy between our website and album in several ways. For example, we stuck to the colour scheme of our album artwork, used a powder paint banner to match the title of our album, and used the same font for website posts that we used for the track list on the back cover of our album.

Our album cover

Font used on website and track list

Banner Same colour scheme

CONSISTENT STYLE

We kept this theme consistent throughout the website, which is also a convention of music websites. Disclosure, for example, have a consistent style on every page of their website. All the pages have the same blog-like layout, with the colour scheme and banner featuring on each.

CONSISTENT STYLE

Like Disclosure, we kept the same colour scheme, and banner for each page. However, we did not keep the same layout for the posts on each page as it made sense to have different layouts for different information. For example, we used a list format for news and tour dates so that all the information was clear and easy to read. However, for our gallery and about page, we used a different layout as there weren’t enough posts on these pages to look aesthetically pleasing in a list format.

INTERACTIVITY

Many dance genre websites contain opportunities for fans for interactivity and connection with the artist and other fans. This is described by Henry Jenkins as "participatory culture", as it allows consumers to participate in and interact with the products they consume.

Interactive opportunities on a website can include a music player, links to social media, a newsletter to sign up to, and videos to watch.

Sub Focus have included both a video to watch and the opportunity to interact with it via Facebook.

We embedded the music video and a soundcloud player for ‘My Head is Jungle’ into Lucid City’s website for the audience to interact with.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media is an important element to include as it encourages interaction between the artist and the audience, which is likely to then further the reach of the campaign. Often fan communities are created and run via social media. Social media allows fans to share and express their love of an artist while creating their own artistic responses to the artist’s work and creating online friendships with other fans. This feeling of community is a main element of participatory culture.

Social media links are used on the websites of many artists, including Sub Focus, Clean Bandit and Disclosure. This will encourage their audience to interact with them and one another, as well as providing another platform through which to market their music. This is because websites such as Twitter and Facebook can be used to inform the artist’s followers of new and releases, and those followers can then ‘retweet’ or ‘share’ the posts to inform their followers, and so on, spreading the media further than just to existing fans of the artist.

SOCIAL MEDIA

We created links to our artist’s social media pages by embedding a live feed which automatically posts all posts from their Instagram and Twitter to this bar (right) on the website’s homepage. This is also an opportunity for interaction as the visitor to the site can scroll through it.

We also included icons at the bottom of every page of our website that link to the artist’s social media pages.This gives fans with the opportunity to like, share, comment on, retweet and favourite the artist’s posts, providing them with a feeling of interaction with the artist. This is a key element of participatory culture.

PARTICIPATORY CULTURE: COMPETITION

Another interactive feature we included on our website to encourage participatory culture was a competition for fans to get involved in. We asked fans to send us their festival pictures for the chance to win VIP tickets to Lovebox festival.

PARTICIPATORY CULTURE: NEWSLETTER

We have provided the fans of Lucid City with the opportunity to sign up for an e-newsletter via the ‘home’ and ‘news’ page of our website. This can make them feel more involved with and included in what they are consuming, which is a main feature of participatory culture.