Project A Assignment Rationale

I created this website as an online exhibition of the band 'Muse'. In order to effectively display information I had to first explore other similar sites and discover what conventions were used, as well as design patterns and structure. I noticed there was really only one or two websites which gave a detailed exhibition of the band. Some common topics where covered in the websites such as discography, history, musical genre, members and news. The website that delivered this information the most effectively I thought was the Muse Official website (which isn't surprising). They used the convention of a horizontal navigation bar across the top of the screen which made optics easy to access. the website also had an interesting design regarding the deliverance of news, with recent news always being available near the top of the page. A gallery was also a rather common convention that was used that just showed pictures of the band at gigs and on tours etc.

First off I decided to download a simple css template to save some time in designing the website itself. I played around with the html code and entered my own information in. The template used a horizontal navigation bar at the top which i found useful to follow similar web conventions. It also had a news column on the side of the page which I also used to display current news about the band. WIth my site I chose to have this displayed on the right side of every page. I hyperlinked each news point to a detailed article on the muse.mu website. I used the Muse.mu website a lot actually because it the most sufficient information.

On the homepage of my website I did a quick overview of the band and explained their history briefly. At the bottom I used images of each of the band members which other websites had not done. And again the news column is displayed on the right hand side for easy access to recent information about the band itself. Similarly with the discography page, I did a brief overview of the albums and at the bottom of the page displayed images of each album. Above these i used hyperlinks to wikipedia articles on each album. This was simply because wikipedia had the most detailed information on each individual album. The images used are also from wikipedia.

In the gallery I displayed images from different photo shoots and tours around the world. I gathered these images from many different sites on the web. They are hyperlinked from each of these individual sites (apart from the first two). The forum page was done quite basically with links to several forum topics on the band to the muse.mu website. This site was the only site to have forums on muse for some unknown reason.For the tour dates, I did something a little different to help set my site apart from the rest. i gathered around ten tour dates and their location from the muse.mu website and hyperlinked them to their location sin google maps. each of the links takes you to a separate location around the world using google maps.