Website AnalysisResearch Task

The National - americanmary.com

The main feature of The National’s homepage is a large image banner that cycles through the band’s

current main ventures: their most recent album and their tour documentary. Above this is a tab bar

with links to other areas of the website: News, Tour, Media, Releases, People, Forum, Shop, and

Follow. Among these are places to consume information about the band’s live appearances, a store to

purchase merchandise, and several places to discuss the artist with other fans. The interesting thing

about this website design is that all of these different categories are located on the same front page,

and clicking on each tab simply jumps you to the relevant part of the page (rather than scrolling).

The URL for The National’s website comes from a song from their first record: ‘American Mary’. Frontman Matt Berninger states: “We never thought of changing the name, although we should have.” This could be seen as bad branding, as the rest of the websites I will be looking at simply use the artist’s name as the URL.!

In the ‘News’ section of the website there are various attractions that would be of interest to fans of the band, each with a rollover image (that becomes clearer when hovered over) and anchor text to provide context to the images.!

The ‘Videos’ section of the website is similarly designed, with a large grid of square thumbnails (depicting live shows, recording sessions and other content) that fills the screen, prompting the user to hover over each rollover image in order to make it clearer.!

The design of the website is centred around a ripped paper theme, suiting the indie genre of the band while maintaining a clean black-on-white colour pallet for ease of reading (consumption). The rollover images are aesthetically pleasing and there is a nice use of colour in the thumbnails. The website of course is linked in with social media, inviting the user to connect with the band on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram with small clickable glyphs in the top right of the front page.!

ADELE - adele.com

Adele’s website is very simple in nature. With no scrolling of any sort, the homepage instead shows only the

cover art for the artist’s latest much-anticipated record ’25’, with links to various places the album can be

purchased. Below this is a bar where users are directed to look at tour information for Adele. Essentially, the front

page of the website exists to sell the consumer either music or concert tickets simply through name and image

recognition alone, an easy feat for a musician with as much star power as Adele.!

Once the ‘Enter Website’ hyperlink is clicked the user is brought to another minimalistically

skinned page. As the user scrolls through this page, content like live performances and

photo shoots are presented in full-screen, sending a clear message that everything Adele

does is deserving of an entire screen to display it on. The simple design of Adele’s website

is (like The National’s) very aesthetically appealing and modern, suiting the classy nature of

the ‘Adele’ brand. Opting to hide fluff like social media links and search bars behind a

button in the top right, the designers of the website put the content front and centre.!

!

Taylor Swift - taylorswift.com

The style of Taylor Swift’s website is clear just from looking at the header, with the artist’s name in

flashing neon red lights and a cluttered tab bar of links, urging the user to ‘join the mailing list’, ‘buy

1989 now’, ‘connect with Taylor’ etc. This website is evidently aimed at a different audience to the

previous two. While The National and Adele are more advertised towards adults, Taylor Swift’s

target audience is teenaged girls who can handle a website that throws lots of information at them.!

As one would expect, Swift’s website places a large emphasis on social media. With eight individual social

media glyphs and many hashtags and links scattered throughout the page, it’s clear that the message to

Taylor’s teenaged fans is ‘share me’. In the modern pop music world, artists achieve recognition and

popularity through hits, so the more traffic is directed to their Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Apple Music,

Tumblr, and Instagram pages the more chance they have of becoming increasingly successful.!

The website also advertises

Swift’s recent (controversial)

Grammy wins, showing the

emphasis placed on winning

awards to validate an artist’s

success in the industry.