The difference between a successful site and the others is all in how close we can come to representing what we want the user to experience. To that end a little background work is necessary.
Remember this site is for the user.
Who is the user?
Personas
It is helpful to clarify as much as possible who will be using the site, the user persona. it is also helpful to create a site persona. In the case of artists websites thats easy, its you.
Who is the person you want to visit your site? Possibly there are a few different people, give them names. Try to come up with 4. You can even find pictures of them on the web. Don’t forget to create your own persona.
? Name
? Profile type
? Age
? Gender
? Occupation
? Character
? Description
? Site usage – How will they use the site? buy? research? refer?.
? Web confidence and context – this will help us clarify how fancy we wanna be
? Brands they identify with – this is the fun part. We know people and love to define them
Mood Boards
A mood board is basically a collection of graphical elements that set the tone for your design. Typically these include examples of:
• Typography
• Imagery
• Colour
• Layout
• Style
If you can, collect the images from the web and paste them in to a photoshop document. Colors, textures, fonts, scenes. If you cant do photoshop or paste them in to a text document try putting them in an email or cut them out of magazines and make 4 sheets
• The initial gut reaction.
• Another which looks almost like a website
• A crazy loose one
• another which is way over the edge, daring and inappropriate
Once you have all 4 you can pick and choose the elements of each one which can represent your persona while appealing to the persona of your users.
It’s never to late to play with this stuff. As much as you love your site as is are you getting the results you expected? It doesn’t cost anything to cut some pictures out of magazines and will help you in other aspects of your professional life to clarify your clients and yourself.