My First Week

I spent my first week with this blog really trying to analyze more mainstream blogs, their content and their structure. I learned a lot that I hope to start incorporating into my own design in order to make my page much more user friendly. A guest lecture in my Internet Communications class from Matthew Marco allowed me to better understand web layouts. Matthew Marco talked a lot about how a website needs to be user friendly in order to increase the time spent on your pages. A way to do that is to make a website scroll based on both desktop and mobile. This is because we live in a large social media using society where all of the content comes to us by scrolling down an endless page. Therefore, you are more likely to keep users on your page if it is setup to scroll because they will be used to this style of displaying content. I focused on two music blogs to apply this knowledge to in order to see how or if they use this feature. The first music blog I came across was Pigeons & Planes, a more indie style music blog covering large and small artists. I really enjoy their website layout. They have an extreme amount of content available while scrolling, consisting of their, “best songs of the week,” as well as their latest articles and breaking news. You can scroll down their website for a while before finally reaching the bottom; however the menu bar stays at the top of the screen the entire time allowing for you to switch to a different section of the website conveniently. My only complaint with their website is the color scheme. The pink text boxes with white letters on a grey and black background certainly creates a bit of contrast, however, it does start to become dull to me, thus losing my interest and making their content begin to blur together. The second blog I stumbled upon while looking to compare was, Drowned in Sound. This website instantly had my attention with its large slideshow taking up over half of my screen. Large headlines and interesting pictures had me reading articles about artists I have never even heard of before, but certainly want to listen to now. They have less content available while scrolling but they do provide content from many different sections of their website, interviews, columns, reviews, news, features and disections; cleverly named after the abbreviation of their website’s title. Despite having many different types of content the title bar does not continue while you scroll down the website and there is no, “back to top” button to allow you go to the top menu instantly. I think this is a weakness for their website because it does not make it easier for the user to jump from page to page and they could easily lose interest. Overall, I learned some necessary information to maintain user traffic on a page that is often overlooked and I am excited to try some things out for my website in the future.