What Do Your Fans Want From Your Website? Simplicity.
While checking my RSS feeds earlier today, I came across a great article over on Michael Brandvold’s music marketing blog about a HubSpot survey that was recently conducted about web design. The survey asked participants the question, “What is the most important factor in the design of a website?”
Over the past few months I’ve been very engulfed in designing websites for musicians and music-related businesses. Since day one, I’ve always believed that simplicity in design, layout, and functionality is the most important thing to consider when putting together a website.
Needless to say, I was extremely pleased with the results of HubSpot’s survey:
![What Do 76% of Consumers Want From Your Website? [New Data]](http://tightmixblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/web-design-important-factors-graph-460x330.png "What Do 76% of Consumers Want From Your Website? [New Data]")
As you can see, an overwhelming 76% of participants want their web experience to be easy.
A lot of musicians want their website to be a work of art, with noisy header images, Flash animations, splash pages, automatic music players, and other gimmicky things. While they can seem cool at first, all of that stuff just ends up getting in the way and degrades the experience your fans want to have when visiting your website. Do you think your fans will be able to access your gaudy Flash website from their iPhones? Think again.
Concentrate on usability first, visual elements second
Instead of obsessing over the aesthetics of your website, let’s think practically for a moment — your fans probably visit dozens (if not hundreds) of websites every day, clicking furiously in an effort to find whatever information they’re so desperately searching for. They are visiting these websites from all sorts of devices (desktop computers, laptops, smart phones, tablets, etc), using all sorts of software (web browsers, mobile web browsers, mobile apps, etc).
Now, a simple Google search will yield thousands (if not millions) of results. Because of this, many websites will get skipped if users can’t easily find what their looking for. So if your website takes a long time to load, has a cluttered layout, uses multiple splash pages, automatically plays music, looks like MySpace, or doesn’t even work with certain devices/software, then you are providing your fans with a pretty crappy website experience.
If your fans can’t even figure out how to download that free song you mentioned in the middle of your set last night, then how can you expect them to invest more of their time to figure out how to purchase the entire album? It’s just bad business, bad marketing, bad everything.
First impressions are paramount.
When a fan visits your website, what is the first thing that they see? If it’s a cluttered mess of news, photos, videos, and links, chances are it will also be the last thing that they see. The first impression that your website gives off is so ridiculously important. That front page has to tell your fans what they should be doing upon arriving to your website. If it’s downloading your latest single, then make it obvious!
Examples
Despite what you may think, it is possible to have a simple website and still be able to accurately represent your image/brand/whatever through subtle design. Below are a few band websites that keep everything clean and easy to find…
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