Design Reference

I’ve chosen 5 music festival websites for my design reference post. The sites are:

1. Glastonbury Festival – in the UK
2. Byron Bay Arts and Music Festival
3. Falls Festival
4. Good Vibrations Festival
5. Coachella – California USA

I’ve used some of Steve Krug’s web standards from the ‘Trunk Test' within my 7 Characteristics, which include:
1. Logo
2. Content/page name
3. Sections
4. Local navigation
5. Colours/design
6. Usability
7. Search function

I've highlighted some of these characteristics in the screen dumps below.

Glastonbury

Byron Bay

Falls Festival

Good Vibrations

Coachella

Summary

Each of the above sites has a logo at the top of the page, some of which the logo is also a Home page button. The good thing about this is it allows the user to identify and brand the site. Other aesthetics shared by all the sites are:

1. a header
2. navigation/menu bar – which allows one to view other sections of the site
3. context/information
4. links
5. design features

6. colour for excitement

These characteristics allow the user to navigate easily throughout the site, and know where they are at all times.

A couple of other features I personally like are:

• Quick loading


• Reduced size images


• Menu at the top


• Logo linked to home page


• Easy to navigate. I like the fact that the Falls Festival site used SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-smil/ it’s a simple yet effective way to present a range of images.

The Falls Festival site has also taken into consideration user preference for those who have slow internet speeds. to achieve this the designer has created an entry page where it allows you to choose the speed of your internet connection.

I believe that these conventions are relevant to the site I will be developing and will try to incorporate some/most of these features into my site.