Website conventions and participatory culture

1. WEBSITE CONVENTIONS FOR
ARTISTS OF THE DANCE GENRE
And how we applied these to Lucid City’s website

2. BASIC CONVENTIONS
We followed most conventions of music websites
when creating the website for Lucid City, while also
challenging some. I have demonstrated how we
did this in this presentation with comparisons of
our website to the websites of dance artists
including Sub Focus, Clean Bandit, Disclosure,
Chase & Status, and Wilkinson.

3. LANDING PAGE
Disclosure have a landing page, which is what visitors are
taken to before they can access the full website.A landing
page is conventional, and is often used to advertise a product
and/or the artist’s social media.
We decided to add a landing page to Lucid City’s
website to follow this convention, and have
advertised both the album and the social media
pages of the artist on it, as well as a .This
combined opportunities to interact and
opportunities to purchase the product.

4. BANNER
Many artist websites use a banner across the top of the page of the artist’s name or
logo. For example, Sub Focus has a banner of his name across the top of his website.
We have followed this convention by having the artist’s name and powder paint
logo as a banner across the top of each page of our website.
Our banner:

5. MENU BAR
The menu bar is typically across the top of the page, such as on Clean Bandit’s website. We
placed our menu bar across the top of each page on our website in keeping with this
convention.
The menu bar on Lucid City’s website:

6. NEWS
We included a ‘news’ page as bands and artists often have this page to keep their
fans updated on what they’re up to, when new music is available, and inform them
of purchasing opportunities they might be interested in.
Clean Bandit’s News page:
Our News page:

7. ABOUT
We created an about page for each
member of Lucid City, which could
either be accessed from one main
about page or from a drop-down
menu from the main menu bar.We
did this as, shown by Chase &
Status’s website, an ‘about’ page is a
common feature of artist websites.

8. GALLERY
We conformed to the convention of having a
page of photos of the artist. Similar to Sub
Focus, we divided our ‘gallery’ page into
different sections.
Sub Focus’s ‘gallery’ page

9. VIDEOS
Although many websites have a page specifically for videos, we challenged this by
distributing our videos across the website as we felt that it fitted better with the
layout of our website.This convention is followed on websites of artists such as
Chase & Status.

10. MUSIC
A ‘music’ page is conventional of any band or artist website, and so we followed this convention with our own website.
Artists such as Clean Bandit use Soundcloud files on their music page, which is what we also used on our website as a player
for ‘My Head is a Jungle’. In addition to this, we embedded theYoutube video for the single and placed an advertisement for
the album on this page.
Clean Bandit’s ‘music’ page:
A Soundcloud file on our ‘music’ page:
TheYoutube video for the single An advertisement for the album

11. TOUR
We followed the convention of having a ‘tour’ page (sometimes called ‘live’ or
‘gigs’).This is where all the upcoming dates for concerts are displayed.
Sub Focus’sTour page: OurTour page:

12. STORE
A ‘store’ page is a common convention of band and artist websites, as it provides
the visitor with more purchasing opportunities and optimises their profits. Artists
such as Disclosure have included this page in their website. We conformed to this
convention.
Disclosure’s Store page:
Our Store page:

13. CONTACT
A ‘contact’ page is a convention of websites, used by artists such
as Sub Focus. We conformed to this convention, providing contact
details for both fan mail and business enquiries.
Sub Focus’s Contact page:
Elements of our Contact page:

14. SYNERGY
A convention of not just the dance genre but all genres is to produce a website in keeping
with the theme of the artist’s latest release.Two examples of this are Wilkinson’s website,
whose banner uses the same graphics as his latest single ‘Hit the Floor’, and Disclosure’s
website, whose website has the same colour scheme as their latest album ‘Settle’.This
helps to create synergy between the artist’s products, which then adds to the overall
branding of the artist.

15. SYNERGY
We also created synergy between our website and album in several ways. For
example, we stuck to the colour scheme of our album artwork, used a powder paint
banner to match the title of our album, and used the same font for website posts
that we used for the track list on the back cover of our album.
Our album cover
Font used on website and
track list
Banner Same colour scheme

16. CONSISTENT STYLE
We kept this theme consistent throughout the website, which is also a
convention of music websites. Disclosure, for example, have a consistent
style on every page of their website. All the pages have the same blog-like
layout, with the colour scheme and banner featuring on each.

17. CONSISTENT STYLE
Like Disclosure, we kept the same colour scheme, and banner for each page. However, we did not keep the same layout for the
posts on each page as it made sense to have different layouts for different information. For example, we used a list format for
news and tour dates so that all the information was clear and easy to read. However, for our gallery and about page, we used a
different layout as there weren’t enough posts on these pages to look aesthetically pleasing in a list format.

18. INTERACTIVITY
Many dance genre websites contain opportunities for fans for interactivity and connection with the artist and other fans.
This is described by Henry Jenkins as "participatory culture", as it allows consumers to participate in and interact with the
products they consume.
Interactive opportunities on a website can include a music player, links to social media, a newsletter to sign up to, and
videos to watch.
Sub Focus have included both a
video to watch and the
opportunity to interact with it via
Facebook.
We embedded the music video
and a soundcloud player for ‘My
Head is Jungle’ into Lucid City’s
website for the audience to
interact with.

19. SOCIAL MEDIA
Social media is an important element to include as it encourages interaction between the artist and the audience, which is
likely to then further the reach of the campaign. Often fan communities are created and run via social media. Social media
allows fans to share and express their love of an artist while creating their own artistic responses to the artist’s work and
creating online friendships with other fans.This feeling of community is a main element of participatory culture.
Social media links are used on the websites of many artists, including Sub Focus, Clean Bandit and Disclosure.This
will encourage their audience to interact with them and one another, as well as providing another platform
through which to market their music.This is because websites such asTwitter and Facebook can be used to inform
the artist’s followers of new and releases, and those followers can then ‘retweet’ or ‘share’ the posts to inform
their followers, and so on, spreading the media further than just to existing fans of the artist.

20. SOCIAL MEDIA
We created links to our
artist’s social media pages by
embedding a live feed which
automatically posts all posts
from their Instagram and
Twitter to this bar (right) on
the website’s homepage.
This is also an opportunity
for interaction as the visitor
to the site can scroll through
it.
We also included icons at the bottom of
every page of our website that link to the
artist’s social media pages.
This gives fans with the opportunity to like,
share, comment on, retweet and favourite
the artist’s posts, providing them with a
feeling of interaction with the artist.This is
a key element of participatory culture.

21. PARTICIPATORY CULTURE: COMPETITION
Another interactive feature we included on our website to encourage participatory
culture was a competition for fans to get involved in.We asked fans to send us their
festival pictures for the chance to winVIP tickets to Lovebox festival.

22. PARTICIPATORY CULTURE: NEWSLETTER
We have provided the fans of Lucid City with the opportunity to sign up for an e-
newsletter via the ‘home’ and ‘news’ page of our website.This can make them feel
more involved with and included in what they are consuming, which is a main
feature of participatory culture.