As this is my first post, many of you may be wondering about my credentials as well as what you can expect of me as a reviewer. So, here's a little back story for those of you who didn't bother to look at the “Staff” section. My addiction to music began early (3, maybe 4 years old). It started with 80s Metal ranging from bands like Loverboy and Whitesnake to artists like Ozzy Osbourne and Dio. I grew up on radio, MTV (when it still had music videos), and Fuse after MTV's fall from grace. As time wore on, as it is like to do, I began to branch out. As the 90s and 00s came and went I discovered a variety of music genres that I thoroughly enjoyed (Alt. Rock, Classic Rock, Blues, Funk, Soul, and even Pop/Rock just to name a few).
I eventually went to college where I double majored in Music Industry Studies and History because, you know, I wanted to make doubly sure that I was completely incapable of finding a decent paying job in my chosen fields after graduation. Those classes taught me to listen and think analytically as well as how to write in a clear, concise manner. Upon graduation, I moved to the Nashville, TN area, hoping to find a job in the music industry, it still hasn't happened. After seeing the struggle of local artists, and my own struggle to stay connected to the music scene, I decided to start this site as a way to provide free reviews to independent and minor label artists hoping that it would help them book gigs and that you guys would go out and support them.
So, what can you expect from me? Well, first off, I won't be “sugar-coating” anything, but by the same token, I won't be ripping artists a new one. I will try to make any criticism given constructive rather than destructive. This will serve to, hopefully, help the artists make their next release/show better. To this point, any comments made for the purpose of trolling the band, author, or other commenters will be deleted. I suspect that most of my live show reviews will be limited to the Nashville area, however the album reviews may come from bands/artists anywhere in the world. Moreover, while my areas of musical delight may be somewhat limited compared to the vast number of genres and sub-genres, I will try to make any review of bands outside of those areas as objective as possible. I intend to focus on non-country artists because in this area they have far more resources at their disposal than anyone else. With all that said, I hope you enjoy the site and the first album review will be coming soon. Thank you for your support.
Hi,
It looks like you're off to a great start with your website. However, there are a couple of things I think you should add to make it more a "review" site:
Overall the style of the site is not too bad, though while I was looking at music sites, quite a few of them used other colors for the far background, and the content text was black on white with some shadows.
The "Who we are" feels kind of "lost"...consider putting just that on your home page, and linking to your blog entries on the side or bottom or keep them on the home page and add the "Who we are" on another page. It is also kind of misleading: The "About" page should have the same information as the "Who we are" and then you can have the staff information underneath. If you want to keep the about information on the home page, then there should be ways to add the blog entries to your home page dynamically during each update, or just add them as they come.
Furthermore, it doesn't feel like a "review" site, but more of a blog...you should change the "blog" title to "Reviews" to make it clear, and you should consider categorizing your blog...that way readers will find exactly the information they need. You can categorize it by music genres, that is probably the simplest way.
AND by adding a star rating to each blog entry (if possible), and perhaps even looking for similarities in all of your reviews and working from there to create something that is generic to every single review.
Consider looking at your competition: http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20038-disconnected-words-connect-the-worlds/
I realize that with a free service you can't do everything, but at least look at your competition and try to make it as professional as what the other sites have and then you'll be on your way to a great site. You should also add a link to either the YouTube channel of the band, or a couple of the band's songs to give the readers a feel for the music. The trick here is trying to keep the readers on your site for as long as possible, so if you can somehow import samples of the band's music into your blog (with their permission of course) then it would be more cool to read the reviews and understand how the lyrics make you feel. You'll also need to look at the Weebly Terms of Service to make sure you aren't breaking any of their Copyright Laws, otherwise they can shut down your site if they see an issue. But adding songs of the band's YouTube videos should be ok...just go into YouTube and embed the videos into your blog. There are plenty of mediums at your disposal with the Internet age, consider using them to your benefit to make a more professional site.
Also, consider how artists can contact you and what information they provide.
For example: if you have the ability to customize your "contact form", you should consider adding more fields specific to every single band:
like the band's website, brief history about the band - where they started or were discovered, websites if they have one, the band's Social Media channels (which I'm sure most bands have by now), and then you can easily add these into your blog once you are writing it, and it will become more organized. If you can let bands upload samples of their music when they send a request for review, then that could be another appeal to a band wanting to be reviewed.
Overall, I think you're off to a great start and I think your site will do well, but please consider your competition and see how you can move up to their levels with the tools you have at your disposal.
Reply
MIchael
12/31/2014 10:55:52 pm
I appreciate the constructive criticism. I agree that my blog does need to be more organized and I definitely need to add some audio to the reviews. Unfortunately, I haven't quite figured out how to do that yet. I've made edits as far as organization goes but they haven't shown up on the blog for some reason.
As far as the rating system goes, I would love to be able to add that in. However, when I do I want it to be as accurate as possible. This means hours and hours of coming up with criteria that would allow me to be as objective as possible (not exactly an easy thing given that we all have our biases).
To your point about the "Who We Are" section, I would love to hear your thoughts on how I could give it more direction.
Reply
reviews
1/1/2015 09:42:52 am
Thanks for appreciating my feedback, it took some time to come up with it :)
There could be a number of reasons why your edits haven't shown up yet:
1) A common issue is that the webpage is probably cached, which is something browsers and website servers do to prevent pages from re-loading on a constant basis - they keep a backup copy of the previous version and at some point will display the new version of the page. A possible solution to this is either to clear your browser's history and then re-open your browser go back to that page, or view the page in a different browser that you rarely use (but that can lead to other styling issues) or ask a friend to view your site.
Of course, the caching could be happening on the server. Sometimes it could take them a bit of time before they'll show your new content. This can depend on how much traffic the website gets, or how the server handles cached content. If you come back to the webpage in a couple of hours and it's still the same, then consider looking at other solutions.
2) Check whether your content is published. There's probably some sort of "Draft" or "Publish" mode on all of your entries, so make sure your pages are published, otherwise no one else will see them :)
As for the sound and videos, you can embed YouTube videos, and I've seen some Weebly sites that embed Soundcloud into their reviews.
Here's a simplified approach of what you can do until you can figure out Weebly's other site features.
http://gignmix.weebly.com/song-of-the-week.html
In this site I like the fact that the Album cover always stays on the left and the social media buttons are bright and easy to see. You could also try to add the social media buttons underneath the album cover and push all of the review content to the left.
With the "Who we are", it feels like you're trying to cram two pieces of content that doesn't have much relation to each other, thus it feels too busy and too many words.
You can have the Who we are, and the Staff content on a separate page, or you could have a short blurb about who you are, and have a link to the About page which would have more information (Staff information and your contact and social media information if you wish). What you have on there now is good, and then underneath you can put something like "Read more..." with a link to the About page.
As an independent reviewer, consider having links to your social media, so your followers know when new info is published. Can you add Twitter updates to your site? That could be something to look into... make the Twitter account as close to your site name as possible, so it's easily recognized and have a link to it on the side of each page.
Another option I was considering is adding concert dates to your blog and using Twitter to link the concert dates and your reviews. Like if you plan to review a certain artist playing a show and want your followers to come out, then broadcast it to your followers and then write your review after the show. Or if you're reviewing an album before seeing someone live, then add information or a link to the event. This seems to be where other sites fall short. They just have music reviews, but no real information about the artist and where to catch a live show. No need to add all of the artist's event info, just a date and time and link where to buy tickets should be good enough and you can broadcast the same information to your Twitter too.
Your home page should also have an overview of all of your entries. With the way you have the overview now, it feels like a whole blog entry, see if you can shorten what goes into the overview, or just keep the title and date.
Your home page layout could be:
1) Who we are with a link to the About (on the left)
2) Overview of blog entries (on the left)
3) Twitter updates (on the right)
4) Upcoming shows/events (on the right)
As far as site design goes, content is read left to right, so the relevant information and the bulk of your content should be on the left side, and any additional information should be on the right. If you have a lot of information on both sides, the viewer just gets confused about what's more relevant and may turn away from the page (there's a whole psychology to this lol)
http://www.nngroup.com/articles/f-shaped-pattern-reading-web-content/
I realize it's a lot to consider, but no site is perfect right from the beginning, and every site management service is a new software you have to learn, so don't get discouraged, I'm sure Weebly has a lot of features that will take time to learn properly and you may end up re-doing things several times. Sites do change as their owners discover new features and the learning curve is bound to happen. And yes, it can be difficult to maintain it all on your own. That's how we get jobs :) but I'm just doing this for fun lol
If you want to learn HTML consider going to W3Schools or take some time to go through Codeacademy. Both are free. There's some cool CSS