I was thinking of the main features for my final project, and came across a few ideas. I am going to split the site from the homepage into sections. Find a musician, Find a band, and What’s Local? From there, you will enter the main part of the site with the main nav, sub nav and content. For the “What’s Local” part of the website, there will be news of upcoming events, bulletin boards of up and coming bands, recently updated muscians and most visited list. I was also thinking of having the “demo of the day” clip to be played . I havent decided if I want to include a forum or not. It would help the user interactivity but may add to much for this project. I may keep it in reserve if I ever want to put it in.
There will of course be a register page for both bands and musicians asking general information along with username and password . I will stress the sub nav to be easily accessible to find bands/musicians. But mostly keep it straight forward when it comes to searching.
I am open to ideas and this is just a prelimenary sketch of features for this.
I think a split home site is a good idea. I am also guess it’s going to be fairly simplistic. I think a simple site design for such a complex idea is good. I would keep the rest of the sites, after the split, just as simple as the homepage.
When you look at community/social networking sites, the 2 kings are FaceBook and MySpace. If you ask anyone who uses both, they will tell you Facebook. I think the reason behind that is because facebook is so simple and easy to navigate. I don’t know how many times I have had to search for a feature MySpace.
Go simple man, less clutter! Though it’s easier said then done.
Collin,
You might look into having a blog as part of the site or at least RSS based pages for news and commenting to the site. Another tool is a wiki, where anyone can add content or ask questions, you can pretty much make up any type of structure you wish. These types of social networking can be added to your server or use their servers and make your site link out to it, then have menus on the blog or wiki to link back into your site. Lots of ways to add this. I am seeing a decline in forums, not sure why, but MySpace and Facebook seem to be more appropriate as Mike suggests, and blogs and wikis are more in that venue than forums. – Just some thoughts to share….
I agree with Mr. B, I think a blog space would be awesome and you might could include a “guestbook” where people who have heard the bands could make comments about them or even on individuals. Peoples interest always creates a buzz in the music industry, and it could potentially make a band or an individual even more popular. Just a thought, I really like where you are headed. Keep up the good work.
I think it sounds great, the way it’s split up. For somone like me, who’s not a musician and just looking to support some local bands, I’d like a way to search for local performances quickly. I know this is a site predominantly for networking among musicians, but people like me would definitely use it too.