Island records are one of the many success stories within the music industry, they have signed artists ranging from the Killers and Elton John. When looking through the company’s website we are met with large images promoting artists on the busy homepage. This straight away brings you into their world, where atheistic is part of the product in the music industry. One could ponder at this stage if the purpose of the site is to raise brand awareness around their artists and label. However, moving through the site the top navigator bar shows a number of functions, including: music, events and store. So as well as creating a space for promotion of music and artists the website incorporates other avenues relating to the record label.

One thing that really stood out is the quality of the pictures and marketing material. The high resolution images really engage the reader and convey the artists brand image. Mainly being focused on fans of the artists, the label website incorporates a model described by Hernandez (2013) as ‘Zig Zag pattern’ where the site will be set up to have the reader’s attention drawn to many things, so it follows the page in a Zig Zag pattern. This is often used for picture heavy pages as the image may take some time to be digested by the reader.

The content on the Island Records website is nicely varied, it offers some regularly updated news about artists on their rota. The writing style is often informal and magazine styled, it is usually kept short with useful links and videos relating to the topic. Yet, it has to be taken with a slight pinch of salt, the label is using these news posts to promote their artists, as such there will be a bias towards their material. The subject coverage ranges from who’s selling well, to who’s releasing new music, to just a simple interview. Having a broad range of content is imperative for the modern shape up in the industry, as they have to have an online presence to compete.

One area of improvement is the dark the navigation bar and some of the colour contrasting. The site has been built to contain vast amounts of images, as a result some of the writing and navigation can be unnoticeable, straight away that is. Somebody with bad eye sight could find it difficult to use the site under certain circumstances. However, this issue is not a difficult one to resolve, it would require more focus on site updating with a eye on this topic.

Reference:

Hernandez, A., & Resnick, M. L. (2013, September). Placement of Call to Action Buttons for Higher Website Conversion and Acquisition An Eye Tracking Study. In Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting (Vol. 57, No. 1, pp. 1042-1046). SAGE Publications.

Bibliography:

University of Leister ‘Evaluating Websites’ [Website] Link: https://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/ld/resources/study/eval-web

Link: http://www.islandrecords.com/