Competitive analysis summary

I have decided to post my competitive analysis summary on my blog so I have a solid reference point for when I write my full report next week.


http://music.nokia.co.uk/IE/frameset.aspx

This site was by far the most technical site I have analysed. It contained a lot of information and used a lot of advanced web design techniques, such as CSS roll over’s.

This site would suit anyone because although it contains a lot of information it is all well structured and the colours used are not offensive in any way.

The site is very clean and has a number of different ways in which to search for a song, such as, naming the artist or clicking a genre of music. All these good features however are let down by the fact that this site doesn’t support Firefox web browsers at all. I think in today world a big company like Nokia should support all web browsers and it shouldn’t say you have to change what you are using if you want to use the site.

This will annoy a lot of people and they will probably go somewhere else for the songs. I would say this site is a clean, modern looking website, but has no real wow factor and this would appeal to most people who use the internet to download becasue you dont really notice the design, just the images.

I would put this site in a modern/technical genre.


http://www.woolworthsdownloads.co.uk

The Woolworths download site really suffers from sticking to the Woolworths corporate identity. I think this is one case you could argue that they could have tried to distinguish themselves from the store a little to appeal to a more select market.

The images are all compressed poorly and the purple and red colour scheme is a poor contrast. I think the fact that half of the big links on the right hand side don’t work shows that this site looks and feels amateurish and when you are paying money over the internet this is the last feeling you want to have about a website.

I think this website is aimed at young girls and I would put it in a female/teen genre category.


http://www.bleep.com/

Evan though Bleep uses small images with no track name or artist to start with, it was by far the easiest to use. Its one page layout never changes and if you knew the song you were looking for you would find it pretty difficult to get stuck or lost using this website.

This was the only site I reviewed where you could look up a record label and it would give you everything they had released to date. I think this is a good feature to have some labels tend to stick to one kind of music, so if you like an album by a particular label more often than not you will like something else in their collection.

I think if the text colours were more contrasting to the background it would improve this site which would then give the site more visual cues which would lead you over from the left section to the right. I like the style and the big chunky “1 2 3” as a background is a good design and makes the site look modern.

I would put this in a street/urban genre of design.