My complete progress with making the website, from start to beginning.

As previously mentioned I was appointed the role of developing the website for my group. I was very pleased to be given this role as I felt it would challenge me, but I also have had previous experience in making websites so this gave me a slight advantage. I started by getting inspiration for the website, looking at rappers who had very similar star images as our character and also artists who have very similar styles of singing. All of their websites were very minimalistic with one page which is scroll down, which then presents a certain number of pages.

I felt this would work well with the website. I particularly looked at Rejjie Snow and Slowthai's website as these were my favourite websites which I felt would fit our artist best.  I felt a video which begins as soon as you open the website would look great, this is also done in Rejjie Snows site. I didn't want the video to just be clips from our music video as we are not trying to represent a single, we are advertising an album.

I travelled to London with my group and with Jacob, to film a very aesthetically pleasing clip - essentially of Jacob messing around in London interacting with the urban areas which we travelled to. When in first started to make the website I placed a black and white time-lapse here to just fit the space to represent what was soon to come. I then started working on making a page which would show my artists tour dates and the venues where he was performing. It was important for me to find lots of different venues which weren't too well known, as it would be unrealistic that a new artist would be playing in the biggest venues in London. This took some time as I started in word and then ended up making it on Photoshop on my phone which is definitely not my forte.

After lots of fiddling around I was happy with the end result. I also spent a long time trying to make a logo for the front page which would go over the video. I used photoshop for a while trying to play around making different logos, but non of these looked very professional. I then used an app called Canva which was much easier to use than photoshop. I downloaded lots of fonts and started using English fonts, however after talking with my group we agreed it didn't look how we imagined.  I realised it would be hard to see what the logo would look like on the site until I had the actual video, so I waited until the video was on the site.

On the Monday, after filming in London over the weekend, I was ready to edit the videos which we had filmed.  I edited the video in to a short clip and when I filmed the videos I used a VHS filter on my phone which gave a very cool effect. I then placed it into the first page of the website making it as an overlaid video. I customised the functions  of the video meaning the viewer couldn't pause or play the video and couldn't control the video in any way. This gave it the effect when entering the website that it played immediately.

I then moved on to trying to design another logo.  Cam and I found a very nice VHS font which looked great and fit in very nicely with the video as the video was a VHS. We managed to get the logo looking how we imagined and then just had to decide on a colour. We felt that red would be good as it was bright and stood out against the dark colours, but also looked serious rather than bright yellow which would not have fit in with the image of the character.

I then worked on making a vinyl cover with our digi pack cover over the vinyl cover with a record popping out. This was not too hard to do as I only had to resize the digi pack image to the same size as the vinyl cover. I placed this at the bottom of the website.  Just above the vinyl image I wanted to have a button which brought the viewer to a shop which you could buy merchandise with the album cover on. This took quite a bit of time as I had to photoshop the image onto several different styles of clothing. I made the shop the same style as the homepage so it would flow well.

After the focus group I changed a few aspects of the website. I was unable to make the font disappear half way throng the video as it was pinned onto the screen and not connected to the actual video. I changed the vinyl products as I previously had a different image to the updated album cover so I used the updated photo instead and this was much better. I also added a box around the shop button which made it look more professional and lastly I added a link to the logo of the page which took you to the homepage which is used in many rappers websites such as Stormzy. I also added this feature to the shop so when shopping you can easily get back to their homepage.

Finally I asked the others their opinion off the website outside of the focus group to try and perfect the video. From this I changed the social media buttons as some were a slightly different size to each other which made the website look slightly unprofessional and lastly I changed the tour list adding more details like the city and the country.   I also added a button which sends the viewer to a link to buy the tickets. This also looked much better and this is often done in rappers websites such as Loyle Carner and Rejjie Snow.  Previously I only had London venues, but after after more thought, I realised it is unrealistic that the artist would just perform in London, so I researched and found other relatively small venues around the United Kingdom.