Designing The Band: Chapter Six

Going against my preference

First off, I went with the first design option. I initially liked the second a bit more, but the first was the favorite of those I showed it to. Once I let it sink in a bit, I think it grew on me as well.

I think my main problem was that it’s not really my “style” and that not only made it hard for me to accept, but it made it a bit difficult to work on also.

This is a common challenge that all designers face. Not everyone likes the same things aesthetically and striving to meet your goals when working on something that “isn’t you’re cup of tea” can be hard.

Now let’s talk about the details and changes a bit.

The background

Well, the first thing you’ll notice is that I added a background. I felt that the main layout area looked a little lost so I wanted to add some visual interest to the overall page. I was thinking that a very subtle background or pattern would be good, but couldn’t find one that fit.

So I decided to experiment. After-all, what is a project like this for if you don’t experiment a bit? I picked a photo I liked and felt fit the feel of the site. After some light editing in Photoshop — bigity bam — we’ve got our background.

I’m not usually a fan of this kind of background (one reason why I decided to try it out) but in this case I think it works rather well. Those on slower systems will note a bit of a slow load. As this is a mock up I’m letting that slide for now, if this was a real site I’d do something about that.

Some subtile changes

With the background in place I made some subtle finishing touches to the rest of the design, some might be hard to catch. I made the text in the “about” box a bit bolder to set it apart a bit more and I tweaked the nav to bring out more of the color and texture.

I tweaked margins, padding and fonts, pretty much trying to hone the look to something I felt was a bit tighter. I still find those cut-out corners a bit hard to work around, but overall I’m pretty happy with it.

I plan on coming back to it in a few weeks to see how I feel, but for now, I’m satisfied.

Post Mortem

Ok, now let’s talk a bit about how the project went. I’ve been keeping track of how much time I’ve spent working on this and I’ll break that down in a bit. First though I want to talk about all the ways this project differed from a real project.

1. There was no client. This is a pretty big difference. It made some things much easier, but it was a challenge as well, as all the direction needed to come from an imaginary place. Oh and I didn’t get paid. ;)
2. I had to create assets. With a real client there would probably be at least some existing assets to work with. At the very least the client would provide some content. This is the main reason I didn’t build the site out — I just didn’t want to work on the content.
3. I had to document everything. This was perhaps the biggest difference when it came to actual implementation. Because I had to write up a post every week it took quite a bit of my resources and drained my creative energy as well. Documentation, even on an informal level as this is, isn’t easy.
4. I didn’t finish the project. This is pretty obvious, but I’ll try and project how it would have went had I actually built the site out for real.
5. It wasn’t real. Well, yeah, just the fact that it wasn’t real throws all sorts of intangible differences into the mix.

The bottom line

I kept track of the time spent actually working on the project, I did not keep track of how much time I spent writing the posts and setting the stage — just the things I’d consider “billable” in a real project. Here’s how it broke down in very simple terms:

Design

17.5 hours. This was a bit higher because I went farther than I normally would on more than one design and I had to work on the identity from scratch. Much of this process you didn’t get a chance to see — all the original photoshop comps for example. Then again I would have liked to spend more time on the actual design so it’s probably pretty close.

Real world estimate for this kind of project: 16 hours.

Development

10 hours. The development on this one was a bit tricky because I was working with a few techniques I’d never worked with before, but in general it was pretty normal. I never did build out the whole site, so a real project would have taken a bit longer I’m sure. As well, things like a shopping cart and message board could have added quite a bit of time to this project, even if I used out-of-the-box solutions.

Real world estimate for this kind of project: 15 hours.

Incidentals

6 hours. This represents things like the user study I did as well as writing up the goals and such. In general this would contain anything not considered design or development and can vary pretty greatly on the project. In the real world this would have been much higher as you’d have more admin time, etc.

Real world estimate for this kind of project: 10-15 hours.

Totals

So, in total I would have billed for about 32.5 hours for the work I’ve done and maybe 45 or so hours if it’d been a real project. That sounds about right.

Now if there were more than one person working on this and/or it was a great client it could be a bit less. Then again, there is the opposite…

Anyway, at a rate of $100 an hour, I estimate a site like this costing around $4500 to design and build. That’s not too bad, and I’m just using $100/hr as it’s easy to figure.

So, what have we learned?

Let’s look at the goals I’ve laid out for the site and the project and see, shall we?

Designing The Band Project Goal

The goal for the project was “to illustrate how a music band site can be very cool as well as usable and built with Web standards.”

So, what do you think? Did I do that? I think so. Maybe not as well as I’d have liked, but in essence I think I met that goal. Whether or not the site is “cool” is pretty subjective and it’s hard to tell how usable it would be as it’s not a full site, but I think we can safely say it would be easier to use than many other sites of this kind out there.

Beauideal’s general site goals

If you refer back to the goals we set for the site itself you’ll realize that there is no real way of telling whether or not we met these goals yet. And that is true for every Web project.

So much for instant gratification. In any case, since this isn’t a real project, let’s pull out our best guesses and see if this site would have been a success!

Business goals

For business goals we wanted to sell the album and merchandise, get fans out to the shows and use the site to get more exposure. Well — we’ve got to make quite a few assumptions here, but I think as much as possible this site would meet those goals.

It would depend on how the site is marketed and used. However, by making it easy to use and navigate we’re enabling the users (fans of the band) to get tour info and get to where they can spend money easily.

At the same time we’ve provided some easy to access info for press and media folks.

User goals

I think the site would do really well with most of these goals, and that was part of the point of the overall project. We wanted to provide a site for fans to

• Find tour dates and information
• Get current news about the band
• Listen to music
• Purchase music and/or merchandise
• Connect with other fans

We’ve taken care of the first four pretty well, you can get tour dates, news and music easily from the home page and it’s easy to get to the store. We failed on the last as I pulled the message board out mid-stream.

I do think that one would be easy to fix by adding boards back in.

Organizational Goals

These are pretty vague, but for what it’s worth I think this site would be a success here depending on how it was maintained. If you hooked Wordpress or Movable Type up to the front page it would be pretty darn easy to update and aside from ease of maintenance the rest of these goals would really depend on how well the business and user goals were doing.

Conclusion

Well, it’s been a bit harder than I’d imagined, but we’ve reached the end of this little adventure. It’s been fun and educational for me and I hope some of you have gotten something out of it as well.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments on the project or this weeks post. Thanks for hanging in there and sorry it didn’t quite go as I had originally planned. That’s what I get for starting this during my summer!

I do plan on revisiting the project a bit when I get back from Hawaii in a few weeks. Until then, comment if you want — but then get out and enjoy summer (or winter for some of y’all) like I plan on doing!