Focus Group

A focus group is when you get a collection of people together to discuss about something in particular. The purpose of a focus group is to get feedback from a neutral point of view. In preparation to the focus group we had to get the final cut of the video ready, the existing website and the existing digipack.
When it came to running the focus group we were (4 of us) were in a classroom with a media class in the year below us with their teacher and we asked them questions on our products that we have created. When asking the questions we were advised to ask them in a different way to get the best and most effective response to help us improve, these questions were
What do you think about the digipak?
What do you think this band is like?
What words you pick to describe this band based on the digipak?
The reason why we are supposed to asking questions like this compared to asking what people like about the website or the digipack is because in this case if they don't like anything then they will say so, we can then learn from the feedback and look on improving the products. Whereas if we just ask what the focus group like about the products we wont find out if there is anything they don't like. We recorded our findings from the focus group with a voice recorder, this was effective because not only does it let us look back on the focus group and see the exact feedback we got from the group, but we managed to do it discretely because its not like we had a big camera in the individuals faces which would likely effect what the individual was going to say. We had a phone on the table which hardly anyone noticed.

The key findings we got from the focus group were

• Too much space on the home page 
• The products on the store page needed to be added- we showed them the products that would be added and they said that the products needed to be neater  
• The lion needed to be clearer 
• The digi pack and the website needed to be linked together better 

Website before focus group

After the focus group

As you can see from the video before the focus group compared to the video of the website after the focus group we have changed a few bits around mainly because of the feedback we got in the focus group.
For example:
That empty space on the home page has now gone
The products have been added
And the lion picture is clearer
The focus group really helped us to develop the website and digi pack from the advice given to us.

update on the website

I spoke to Phil on Friday about the website and he was basically telling me that we are not gonna go very far with the website if we are just making it up on the spot, we should look at other websites for inspiration. This really annoyed me at first as we spent quite a lot of time on the website, but then i realised that we really hadn't gone very far with it at all so i took Phil's advice and started to look at some other websites for inspiration.

Looking at these two websites is what has given me the inspiration. I think the simple look is the best for us. 

feed back on website

From the feedback to the video, the main area that appeared to come up the most was the background photo for the pages, this is still a working progress for us however. But we are looking for a abstract photo, so we do know what we are looking for which is good. Mainly the advice that we got was to make the gallery slide on the home page fit the home page better and put it below the top half of the page so that people dont see the top of the gallery when opening up onto the home page which looks scruffy.

Website photo's

Today i tried to organise a photo shoot but unfortunately only 1 of the band members turned up. But instead of calling the photo shoot off i thought we might as well just have some single shots. Luckily Angel, a friend of mine is a photographer and so i asked him if he would take the photos if i told him what i wanted. We took some photos of Giorgio up against a big white sheet with lights on him, the reason for putting him in front of the white photos means that we can change the backgrounds effectively, as shown in the photos. Obviously we need some band photos as well but at least i have some photos to put up on the website and some photos for Perry to put on the digi pack if he needs them. For the main background of the homepage we are going for urban look, for example buildings, this is because it fits the genre of our music.

For these photos Angel used photoshop to transfer the image onto other images that he has taken, the fact that Angel had the background photos taken already means that the quality of the photos are much better as they haven't been altered with on the internet. I prefer the photo with the graffiti on the wall to the simple black wall, this is because it is more visually appealing.

Using Wix

To start with i struggled using Wix to make the website, this is because i havent ever used it before and therefore took some time getting used to. However once i watched a few YouTube videos and played around with the software my self i found it very straight forward, from what i have heard it is not as professional as Word Press, this doesnt bother me as the website that we need to make that from the research of other alternative rock bands show that the website should just be a simple one. The process of making the website has been quite long so far and the website still doesnt look quite right, this is because we still dont have homepage for it yet so all the information that has gone in to the homepage is supposed to support the homepage picture it self not some template picture. The image we are looking for is a urban one. I think once we have the right homepage image the process will be much quicker.
I have organised few photo shoots but unfortunately no one has shown up which is quite annoying considering that we dont have much time left to complete the website and the digi pack

possibilities for website idea

http://www.bastillebastille.com/home/#url=%23
 Looking at Batille's website has given me inspiration for how i want to design our website. The main feature of Batille's website is the dissolving revolving picture. This is what catches the audiences eye straight away. For our Website i wanna do the same thing with a dissolving revolving picture where each member walks into the frame after each other, so one person will walk into the frame and then a second person will walk in then the third. To do this we will just take a shot of a cool back round that i have yet to find, and then take a shot of all 3 members then two members then 1 member then nothing just the background.

Here you can see that the main feature is the picture and the Band Name. Unfortunately you can't see the revolving dissolving pictures because it is a still shot that i have uploaded.

In the research we did as a group looking at websites of alternative american rock bands we found that most of the websites the main feature was the picture and the band name, this supports the website that i wanna do which is important because we should follow the conventions of the music genre to help make it look more realistic 

Media shoot day

Media shoot day powerpoint from bertieclarke231