Web principals and protocols report

The website I have chosen to analyse is ultimate-guitar.com. This is a free online resource aimed predominantly at guitarists. Its main purpose is to allow guitarists to learn how to play songs and upload their own tablatures for others to use, however as the website has grown in popularity content aimed at bassists and drummers has also been added to increase the target audience. Ultimate Guitar has become a vast website and now features items such as news in the music world, video tutorials on how to play songs, reviews on musical equipment, the option to sign up for newsletters and even contains a customisable home page option for its members. There are many purposes to Ultimate Guitar, to inform, educate, entertain and instruct.

Looking at the assets of the website you can see that images, text and videos are included there are also numerous graphics and logos. I think the creators of this website chose to leave things such as background music and sound out as many people find this distracting and it doesn’t compliment a website and tends to be considered a tacky technique. There are also no animations on the website, I think this is because animations are more commonly used on websites aimed at a younger audience, where as Ultimate Guitar is aimed at people of all ages.

 When first opening up the homepage of the website, you are presented with a modern, informative and welcoming design. As you can see, each topic is categorised with the most recent items displayed alongside pictures, nothing is too attention grabbing but on the other hand the homepage does look a little bit cluttered and a new user might be a little confused as to where to go if they were unfamiliar on how to navigate the website. Another criticism I would pick out about the homepage is that the colour of the text is not consistent, as you can see most hyperlinks are yellow but some are green or red and at first look there is no justifiable reason for this. 

Looking at the tabs bar along the top of the website (included left), you can see a number of options for the user to select from, this is useful for people who know what they are looking for and know where to go. To help new users there is also a search bar, clicking the “advanced” link there is also the option to refine a search for more relevant results. I think this would be useful to a lot of users as there is a very large library of content and manually searching could take a while, which also might not comply with the average of three clicks before a user tries a different website. A closer look at the tool bar (above) shows in greater detail which options are available, hovering over a link in the tool bar will turn the font of the option grey, this is a visual cue and informs the user that the tab is an active hyperlink. The change of colour attracts the users attention and prompts them to open the link. This is a universal technique used amongst most websites.

Looking at the overall design of the website, the background is a slick black and grey, these are gender neutral colours and I think it gives the website a modern look. The background also makes the yellow text stand out which gives the text a sense of importance. I like the use of images on the website as they are all relevant to what they are used alongside, the images are all of a very high quality, but at the same time they do not make the page slow to load. The black background stays the same on every page except for tab pages which are white with black text; I think this is to make it easier to read for players and less strenuous on the eyes. I noticed a lack of semiotics on this website, all of the colours seem to be calming colours and there are no really strong visual cues, although many people would consider this as a bad design point I think this has been done on purpose as many people dislike using websites that are always prompting them to do different things. I did however notice that the Community section on the homepage is written in green text, this is perhaps to attract users to sign up to the website as green is an action colour.

The main features of Ultimate guitar are;

• Guitar, Bass and Drum tabs
• Video lessons on how to play songs (tailored to the individuals playing skill)
• Interviews with musicians
• Music related news
• Competitions
• Reviews on music equipment
• Community features that allow users to message, blog and write their own tabs

I will now take a closer look at the logo for Ultimate Guitar. A logo is often a major part of any website as it needs to be instantly recognisable and at the same time needs to be appropriate for the website and also be aesthetically pleasing to the websites target audience. I like the logo the Ultimate Guitar have created, the main colour is a calming blue and the use of a gradient over the blue creates a more modern look. The ‘G’ in the middle is in bold yellow and stands out from the rest of the design, it has also been modified to give it horns, in my opinion this is to appeal to rock fans with which the “devil horns” are very popular amongst. Doing this shows that Ultimate Guitar is aware of the likes and dislikes of their target audience and it is easy to see how they have incorporated their understanding into their logo. Another interesting feature of the logo is that the background colour changes in relation to the section of the website. All of the colours used in the different variations of the logo are gender neutral and are also soothing colours to look at, this is because if a logo is too attention grabbing it can distract the users attention. I also think this is why Ultimate Guitar decided not to have an animated logo. When looking at the different pages on the website, the logo stays in the same place the whole time this is to familiarise users with the website. The logo is also hyperlinked to the homepage, I think this is a very useful feature as it provides users a quick way to go to the start of the website and is a good example of helpful navigation.

A sign of good navigation in a website is that a user can find what they are looking for in a maximum of three clicks, this is the average amount of time a person will spend on a website before going elsewhere to find what they are looking for, it is very important that a website is easy to navigate and that hyperlinks are working properly. To test how good Ultimate guitar is for navigation I decided to do a test on how many clicks it would take to find information. I will see how many clicks it takes to find tabs for the song “Knee deep” by Job For A Cowboy.

Click one: although it did not show up in the print screen, the search bar presents a list of songs that you might be searching for by looking at what you have typed so far, similar to what Google does, I find this a good time saving feature.

Click two: After searching the name of the song I am presented with a number of songs by different artists, they are categorised by artist to avoid confusion, there is also a number of links for related searches. Each of the tabs has been rated by users so that people will know how accurate the tab is.

Click three: I have reached the tab I was looking for, as you can see there are a number of helpful interactive assets, such as the “Auto Scroll” bar, this is for users who want to play the song without having to scroll down the page manually, Auto Scroll allows a user to set how fast it will move down the page. 

Overall I have found Ultimate Guitar to be a competent and cohesive website that is very easy to navigate, even to users who are new to the website. I like the fact that there are no attention grabbing features and that the website is not weighed down by unnecessary assets such as animations or sounds. I find using the website pleasant and informative. The topics featured are relevant and interesting and looking at assets such as the logo and “Auto Scroll” it is obvious that Ultimate Guitar pay close attention to their audience. The website is a good resource for players at all levels and all ages, the range of songs is huge which covers many different genres.