How fansites should and shouldn’t work
Recently, a friend of mine caused drama on the internet. Stuart Traynor, the man who also created the site design for The Musical Chairs, recently went on a rant about a Muse fansite called Muse Live. It is quite long but for the most part it was a well-founded and thought out critique of a fansite that has had a meteoric rise since its conception in 2003. Unsurprisingly there has been a monumental backlash (mainly from angry Muse Live members) and it has opened up a debate about what fansites should and shouldn’t be. So I thought, in the first of a two-parter, I would look at some different areas of these websites and ponder how these subjects should be done and how they shouldn’t.
Sites that I’m using as examples for this feature include At Ease (Radiohead), Muse Live, MuseWiki and The NIN Hotline (Nine Inch Nails).
Design: This is the first thing your eyes see when you browse these websites. This is a prime factor in determining whether or not you will come back and visit the site again. Sites like Radiohead fansite At Ease have a relatively clean design and colour palette with a simple contents bar near the top and the latest news slap bang on the front page where you can see it without needing to scroll. However, sites can also be pretty badly designed. Muse Live is an example, as the default pink skin is pretty…debateable. I also never really got the idea of having two contents sidebars.
News: This is an interesting subject. Fansites are not professional news sites – the people that submit news are definitely not journalists (that’s my job). But there has to be a line drawn on the substance of news that is posted. Some go for the ‘only post when there seems to be concrete news’ approach like At Ease, some go for the ‘post concrete news and news that might be of interest to fans’ approach like the NIN Hotline and some go for the ‘report on anything that is related to the band and try to keep updated even if there is no news approach’ like Muse Live. Truth be told, there is no ‘correct’ way of doing things but my own personal feeling is that visitors like to know that when they visit a site, they expect the news that is there to be accurate.
Information: Visitors also expect fansites to contain a wealth of information about the bands they love and they have always tried to include as much information about a band as possible. However, in the last couple of years or so, wiki technology has allowed fans to start up wikipedias based on a band and allow users to add and edit information to their heart’s content. One of the first of these sites that I saw was MuseWiki. Since it started in 2005 it has turned into a beast of a resource for Muse fans the world over. However, just like the main wikipedia, because of the fact that anyone can edit a page on the website, people should sometimes take certain information with a pinch of salt.
Come back tomorrow where I’ll talk about two other important factors – community and downloads.
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Posted on March 4th, 2009 by Max
Filed under: News, Odds & Ends
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