At First Look

As I stated in the executive description of my project proposal, the primary focus of the blog was updates from our first studio album, Her Hair Sways to the Authentic Sounds of Death, along with embedded media such as images and video of the band rehearsing or playing gigs.

The Studio Updates

I think I did well here. Blog posts were made within a day or two after work was done within in the studio, making things consistent with the proposal. That said, while I think I gave enough descriptions of the studio process that the general reader would have a good idea of what was going on, I think I could have done a better job of going more in-depth with some technical descriptions. Here is just one spot of where I should have explained more about the technical processes involved with recording.

Media Content

This is blog's strongest point, in my opinion. A multitude of pictures and videos are scattered throughout the blog, enough so that I created separate galleries for each (images and videos). There are external links to the band's YouTube page, which contain other videos that may not be posted on the blog, and also the band's MySpace, which has the entire album uploaded on its music player along with a lot more photos that aren't on the blog.

Other Content/Pages

The first page is a short history of the band, which I plan on expanding on until it is encyclopedic in its details, because it will hopefully give readers an idea of what it has taken for this band to get where it is at.

The second page is a quick bio section where readers can learn more about us as people, as well as some of our musical influences. Including our mascot Duck Norris here was apparently a good idea, since readers seemed to respond well to it.

The next two pages are the aforementioned video and photo galleries, where all the media that has been embedded within earlier blog posts are collected. I thought that it would be easier for a reader that has already visited the blog to find a video or pictures they had seen before without having to search through the entire blog for them. Most of the photos are linked to higher-resolution versions for better viewing. I hoped that these would also direct readers to the YouTube and MySpace pages in order to find more media.

The last page is the lyrics section and it is my "pride and joy" of the blog because of the time and frustration spent on perfecting the jumping HTML links (AKA "back to top") . However, because the amount of research and exasperation required to get it right, it is also where I learned the most new information on HTML coding.

I also enjoyed creating the header for the blog since I like working with Photoshop.

External Linking

Another somewhat strong point here. The links to my personal blog, the YouTube page, and MySpace the MySpace on the right side of the blog. There is also a fair amount of external linking throughout, such as here and here, as well as linking to a few other things on YouTube and http://www.en.wikipedia.org. There probably could have been more linking (which goes along with the need for more technical description), but on the other hand I feel there was a good ratio of external linking to the blog posts. Too many external links direct readers away from the blog and distracts them from reading its content, while not having enough leaves out the variety that would be there otherwise.

Other Comments

I didn't get as many views as I had hoped for with this blog, but a solution to that would be more consistent blog posts, even when nothing newsworthy has taken place. Since the album went up on the MySpace, views there have soared. The blog is already linked to on there, but I could add a flashy banner that links to the band blog which would probably up the views. I also have a link to the blog in my signature on a forum where I post, and I get occasional views from there. Again, more consistent blogging would probably help keep readers coming back.