New official Röyksopp website

Delarge

Junior Member
Hey hey - what's popping?

After a lot of tea and whiskey, I finished the new website for Norwegian chillout duo Röyksopp yesterday: royksopp.com

Most musicians' websites are frankly awful, so I've tried to keep things clean and simple here. The main idea here was to ask - what do you want when you visit a musician's website? Predominantly music and videos - so that's what you get, secondary to the navigation on every page - with a music player and a featured video plucked form the video section.

Their only real design request was to include the 'beams of light' that you see there, which tie in with their new album and single artwork.

It's a hybrid of Wordpress, my own code and the Flickr API to allow fans to contribute to the site in the gallery area, there's a lot of links about for last FM and iLike etc. in the discog.

I also tried to avoid too many design cliches - yes there are a few gradients, but that backgorund turned out quite well I think, as I was slighlty dubious as to how those 'beams' would work, I've avoided too many icons (and using those famfamfamicons) - just small comment icons and recognisable icons to accompany the social networks on the 'Connect' page...

Enough babbling from me - have a peep and let me know what you reckon:

>> royksopp.com
 
That's brilliant Paul! I'm a big fan of Royksopp and this site is spot on I think. You've really captured their style well. I like that you've avoided the cliches and come up with a very original design. The beams work really well, and from a usability point of view the site is very intuitive and easy to use. Great job!
 
Hay buddy, I like it, a few things that I noticed where ~
Are people mainly going to look for the band in English, or Norwegian or what ever?

If English remove the character encoding in the title element as what that has a good chance of throwing the search engines TBH, people wont search for ~
Röyksopp

Which is what the search engines will index, they will search for Royksopp, now that may be a branding issue or what ever, but.....

Your navigation may get you penalized because it is different text than what the images are, not a major break of the rules by any means but if it got picked up it would be down to a reviewer who could be having a bad day as yours was site number 200 that they just checked.

So to avoid any issue change the link text to match the image links, it shouldn't matter to your design.

Again same as the title element I would remove the character encoding in the H1 again wont matter to the design, but will optimize the search for English terms, again depending on the language used to find them I suppose.

You have title attributes on links that don't need them.
Check my thread on Accessability coding for more info on why that is bad.

There is huge sections of code that have been commented out, these can be removed as they will reduce the server strain, include performance, be it slight, and reduce your code bloat.

Overall your code seems very clean and is semantically correct which is a very good thing, IMO.

Design wise I really like it TBH, a few niggles would be the watch the videos link should be watch our videos as you have our music above it and would make more sense.

Also you link to your home page from your home page twice.
once on the logo and once in the footer, you should never link to the page you are on as it leads to problems with site orientation and if this is the home page why is their a link to the home page?

Hope it helps
Jaz
 
Hey Jaz - thanks for the comments - some interestings tips there - I will make some changes...

As far as the design and wording goes, I didn't have that much say in it... that's what they wanted :)
 
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