ICT Project 1A

Tokio Hotel gave their first concert in the United Kingdom on 19 June 2007. Ready, Set, Go! was released in the UK as the band's first single on 27 August 2007. The song reached #77 in the Singles Chart. A special UK edition of "Scream" (including new, unreleased tracks) is scheduled for release in early 2008. A video for "Scream", the English version of their 2005 hit "Schrei", was also recorded.

And here is how it appeared on my Website.

Tokio hotel are very famous in their homeland and many of their singles have reached number 1 in Germany and the surrounding countries. But they have broken into England too!

So far they have released 3 singles in English, 2 of them getting into the top 100 in the UK! These 3 songs are 'Monsoon,' 'Ready Set Go' and 'Sceam.' Also they have released an album in English entitled 'Scream.' this was a compilmation of some of their German songs translated into English.

Though Tokio Hotel have recorded many more singles they have not been formally released yet! These include. Instant Karma, Break Away and On the Edge.

I got the names of the new songs from Youtube and my Tokio Hotel albums. (non-it sources!)

I put all of these prices on my website on the Music page so that viewers could buy the CD's. Here is a print screen of this page.

THE INTERNET SEARCHES

It was very hard to gather the information that I needed for my webpage as the band is German and have not released many singles in England. This was very obvious when I tried to research about them.

Firstly there was the lack of webpage's actually available about them. When I started I was quite lost and was just looking for general information. When I typed in Tokio Hotel Band Google found little over 350,000 websites. Though this seems like quite a lot when I searched for other bands in my free time I found well over 1,500,000 websites on Google.

This was made even harder when I tried to find specific information. For example, when I was researching about specific band member, Georg Listing. I used the 'advance search' tool.

I found only 291,000 webpage's and in most of these it was simply stating that he was in the band and that he played the bass guitar. I used this information to further narrow down my search by adding the instrument he played into the search engine. This narrowed my search down to a minute 1,160 results.

Another way that I refined my internet searches was when I was looking for the bands singles for the Music page. Though this search only found 44,000 sites these sites were generally informative ones that I could rely on. When trying to find this specific information I needed to use many different sites to get ALL of the information. For example when trying to find out information about the music they have released and the CDs they have released. When I typed into the search engine 'Tokio Hotel CDs' the Amazon website appeared at the top. This was helpful because it gave me the images and pictures that I needed. However I had to keep searching because it did not tell me about the release dates. For this information I generally used the Tokio Hotel Homepage.

When researching about the band on Google I had to be careful, there were many phoney sites that I came across that could have really done some damage.

This site that I acme across was actually giving information about the Tokio Hotel Mobile game, not the actual band.

This was an UNRELIABLE SOURCE!!!

PICTURES

Many of the pictures that I used were edited before I used them. Tokio Hotels main colours are black, red and white, I wanted to use these colours because it would suit the style and audience. However there was a big problem with using these colours. All of the pictures look really pale on the dark background. To fix this I gave most of the pictures more contrast and I played with the light too.

I found a good picture of Bill on a French version of Bebo, Jeuxvideo. Jeuxvideo is reliable and is updated around every 48hrs, which means that the pictures and information are all current. Here is the picture...

I wanted to edit the picture a bit. I wanted it to be placed on to a dark background. So I needed to make it stand out more. I added more contrast and made it a little darker. I also cropped it and the resized it. Here is the new picture that is to be placed onto my website.

I then found my second picture, this time of the whole band. I found this picture on the Tokio Hotel official Bebo page. This website is updated by Tokio Hotel very often.

I resized and added more contrast to this picture. This is again because I wanted it to be placed onto a dark background.

The picture that I changed the most was one of the whole band.

Here is the original.

Because this picture had many contrasting colours it was very hard to edit and not make it look very odd. I simply changed the effect of it.

Here is what appeared on my webpage.

THE WEBSITE!

Now that I had all of the information and pictures that I needed I could start my website. I used dream weaver to create my website and decided that it would be beneficial to me to create a story board to keep me on track through out the project.

Below is my story board.

The black arrows are representing the webpage's linked directly to the homepage.

And the purple arrows are to show the connections between the webpage's, not via the homepage!

THE DESIGNING

Once I had done this I wanted to design each webpage before it was created. This would help me to make sure that all of my webpage's are suitable for th estyle that I wanted to create.

I started with the home page. Here is my first try.

Here is my first attempt at a hompage.

I liked it but thought it was a little girly for Tokio hotel. Tokio Hotel are renouned for their angular designs and I thought it did not represent the band how I wanted it to.

So I tried a second design.

Again I liked this design. I thought it represent the band well and connected everything nicly. The onli problem I had with this design was that it may be viewed as a formal page and people might get the wrong impression. I used this idea as the basis but tried to change it to make it more fun. Here is a preview of the final page.

I love this design! It gives formal information in a fun way.

I did this with all of my pages to make sure that the one that I produced was exactly what I wanted.

PRESENTATION

On my website it is obviously very important that there are no spelling mistakes, so I used spell check. Here is a print screen of my webpage about Bill and Tom. When typing the information I wanted on the website into the 'Dreamweaver' program I mispelt the word 'endorsement' but missing the 'e' in the middle. I soon reolised my mistake in the spell check and changed it. Here are the print screens before, the spell checking and after

I really wanted my website to be fun and 'lively.' I used the site www.cooltext.com to get interesting headlines and links. Most of the lines were flashing as this draws the audience's eye to them. My aim was to help people who were looking for information to find it easily.

Here are a few them.

On my website there are many videos used. This was for people who did not know that much about the band, to get a feel of their music. I had many problems with the videos; they were quite temporary as to when they were working. I tried countless time to fix the error but I was no able to. Sometimes they show and sometimes they come up with a blank block. Though I must admit that this was quite fustrating at the time I tried to find different ways of saving the videos. At the momment they are playing, but I am not sure if this is perminant.

Here is what they look like when they are working

And here is what they appear as when they are not

I wanted to make sure that my background colours were both relative to the band and not to different that it is not nice to look at. I really did not want that much variation. I decided to use the Tokio Hotel colours (black and red) for my backgrounds.

PROBLEMS THAT I ENCOUNTERED

As well as the videos issue I had problems with the backgrounds. I had some difficulty when trying to put a background on to the gallery web page.. I could not get the 'th logo' as the background. I realised that this was because I was using a table to set out my work. I then made the 'th logo' as the background of the actual page, and made my table transparent.

These were the two main problems that I encountered. The other problems that happened whilst I was creating my website were only minor and I was able to fix them myself or with a little help from a friend.

CHANGES TO MY WEBSITE

As I started to create my website there were a few things I tried and later changed for various reasons. Here are a few examples.

Once I had decided which colours and pictures to use on my Homepage I added the text. Initially I tried to use an informal voice to relate to my young audience and this is what it looked like.

Here is the text that was on the Homepage.

Tokio Hotel are the best band ever!!!!!!!!!!!!! They are a German rock band made up of four great artists; Bill, Tom, Georg and Gustav. Bill is the fab lead singer and has been interested in music since he was a little boy. His twin brother Tom plays guitar in the band sooooo well. Georg plays bass guitar and Gustav plays the drums.

Tokio Hotel sold loads of singles in Germany but have recently made it into the UK Music charts. They were obviously nominated for best artist in the EMA's and they won by miles! Look out the new fab band is going to become very very very famous

I found that though this did seem to engage with the young audience that I was trying to attract it was a bit over the top. I thought that I needed to change my homepage because it was too informal and needed to include a bit more information about the band. Here is what I replaced it with.

Another change that I made was to the Bill and Tom page. At first I just wanted to give the audience a bit of information about the members of the band so that the audience really concentrated on the music, the most important part of the band. Here is a print screen of the first Bill and Tom Page.

As you can see I just gave a little bit of information about the two band members; their hair and eye colours and a little bit about what they are famous for. I decided to change this to make it more formal; I added heights and weights etc for the fans researching the band members. Here is a print screen of what the page looked like after I added this information.

I think that by doing this the people that looked at my website would be able to learn more about their favourite member and more about the band in general.

I also decided to change some of the pictures I used on the Gustav and Georg page. Here is the before screen shot.

I wanted to make the page look more professional by more close up shots and possibly shots from the same photo shoot. Here is the after shot.

OTHER SOURCES

I tried to use a number of different sources. I found this quite difficult as Tokio Hotel is a German band. This meant that non - IT sources were hard to find. Luckily I already had a calendar that had snippets of information about the band on each page. The information I found was not information that I didn't already know, though it did back up some unreliable information that I had found on the internet. For example it was rumoured that the band initially formed under the name 'Devilish' but then were renamed 'Tokio Hotel' before they were put under contract by Universal Music. This is my non-IT source. That I have scanned in. Also I have attached the 'January' page where I found this information to the end of my coursework. Another source that I used is the MTV EMA's. The advertising for the event and the actual programme helped me think about various different information that I could include. This source gave me up to date information about the band successes but this had little use to me whilst creating the site. It gave me the information that I needed to decide which video's I wanted to be presented on my website but little else. The TV information that I gathered may be used as my second IT source

Another IT source I used was my home scanner. I found a picture that I wanted to use in my website so I scanner it into the computer and inserted it on my homepage. Here is a print screen of the image on my homepage.

SAVING MY WORK

I tried to work as safe as possible whilst creating and analysing my website. After every lesson I made sure that I saved all of my work onto my USB. This new information was then saved onto my laptop. This meant that my work was saved on 3 different sources. This defiantly made my work easier to locate as I had many different ways of reaching it. The only problem that I had with this method was naming the files differently so that I knew which ones were the most recent. I had many files that were titled very similarly but I soon realised this issue and fixed it by creating new folders with the final information on it.

Here is how the information was saved in the final folder. I had separated my information into 4 main folders, documentation, images, school sheets and webpage's. This made it very easy to access any information that I needed. Here is also a print screen of what each folder contains. I found that by being organised in the way I saved my work I was able to make my work more organised. For example, when linking two webpages together.

PROS AND CONS TO USING A COMPUTER

There are many advantages and disadvantages when using a computer. There are some errors that may occur and there are not many ways of finding out what has malfunctioned. Sometimes you just have to keep trying to insert the work until it works. On the other hand using computers makes your production a lot quicker. You can also create mass production very easily.

Another problem with using the computer was that there were a lot of copy right boundaries that meant that you could not necessarily present and use the information that you wanted to. A common example that I have already used was that Youtube was banned at school. This meant that all of the videos that were used in my website did not work. The same block system meant that I could not use the pictures that I wanted from Google images. I just had to make sure that I got this information working at home. This is where scanners could come in useful. An example of copy right came into light when I was searching for images to put on my website. At the time the band were releasing a new single. Due to this they were organising and taking part in promotional photo shoots. This meant that these new pictures made for the band were not allowed to be saved and used on other websites.

Viruses are common when researching about bands. People can attach viruses to pictures so that when you try to download them you download a virus too! I have special software on my home computer and laptop that prevents me from opening sites where viruses are present. Also a way that you can avoid viruses is to use the firefox search engine. This was specially designed to not open viruses.

LINKS

I used a lot of links through out my website. There were links linking the homepage to all pages and there were also link between the pages. There were links between that gallery and the member pages. This worked by clicking on a picture and I took to the relevant members page. I think that this was a very easy but mature idea. By this I mean that it is a skill used by official web pages all over the world.

For example this picture of Tom from the gallery, when clicked on, will take you to the Webpage about Bill and Tom.

THE ACTUAL WEBSITE

All in all I created 6 individual webpage's.

I had a homepage as shown above,

A webpage titled gallery which held around 16 images

Another site is all about the music that tokio hotel have released

Video's are all over my website but I do have a webpage made specifically for videos.

I also created two other webpage's. One was made for bill and tom and the other for georg and gustav.

ANALYSIS FOR HOMEPAGE

My home page was quite simplistic; I used only one picture and 2 paragraphs. I thought that it was important just to give the viewer basic background information this was they did not spend time reading through irrelevant information. Generally when someone researches a band on the internet they are looking for certain bits if information. For this reason I added 5 other links to pages about specific information, these links were all shown clearly so that the viewer could access the information that they wanted easily.

ANALYSIS FOR THE GALLERY

I tried to vary my images so that there was a good mixture of pictures of the whole band and the individual artists. I then added links so that a viewer could click on the relevant image and be taken to the corresponding page about the member. I thought that this was important because if a viewer is researching about one band member they generally wish to receive an images and general information about that character.

ANALYSIS FOR THE MUSIC PAGE

The music page was a lot more symmetrical than the other pages; this made it stand out slightly. The other page were ser out from the right to the left, however the music page was set out a lot more central. The information that I put onto this page was very important, it had to be up-to-date and factual. I informed the viewers of the latest releases that the band has made as this would be on of the key pieces of information that people would search for. I used famous pictures of the band (advertising campaigns in England) so that the webpage would relate to the TV adverts. On this page I inserted the next predicted song to be released by the band as this is likely to come into relevance in the near future.

ANALYSIS FOR THE VIDEO PAGE

My video page contains 7 of the bands videos. I tried to really vary the content of this page by using both German and English videos and videos that have be formally released and others that have not yet been formally released. I also tried to show of the bands versatility by choosing slow and fast songs, also songs in different styles. I received all of these videos from youtube. This gives the viewer a hidden advantage... when you move the curser over the video you can select from a range of different videos by the same artist.

ANALYSIS FOR THE GEORG AND GUSTAV PAGE

It was very important for me to give a good amount of information about Georg and Gustav as I have noticed that there is not in actual fact that must out there. This means that it may be one of the things that the viewer is looking for. Luckily I found their official bebo account for the UK. This gave really interesting information about the two that I fan would be interested in, for example their inspirations. I also included individual pictures of both members and an image of the whole band. I feel that this page is one of my most simplistic pages which is exactly what I was aiming for. I wanted it to seem like this page was simply about the band members, not the music that they played. I feel that I accomplished this successfully.

ANALYSIS FOR THE BILL AND TOM PAGE

I tried to create a page about Bill and Tom that would satisfy the viewer's questions about the twins. I gave a short paragraph about how the band started and the success so far. I then went on to give a small fact file about the two members. As these two are the most famous (they have much more sponsorship deals) people will already know about them and their background so I included some numerical facts that the fans will be interested in e.g. their height. I also included the video of the song 'Break Away.' This song is known to be the 'song of the twins' as it is one of the first ones that they wrote and it really shows off their talent well.

CONCLUSION

I really enjoyed this project. Though I did find it hard at times, I was happy when I saw the finished result. Website designing has captured my interest since year 7 and I am always eager to better my skills. Though I do think that this result is good I am aware of what I would change about it in the future. To me the website looks a bit immature and I think it is obvious that I used a table to set it out. In the future I would like to do more research on the LAYOUT of official and popular websites, as well as the information research. However when I asked others of their opinion they thought the exact opposite. They said that the layout of my website was particularly good and looked very professional. They also said that it was very eye catching. I was happy with their thoughts as this was the effect that I tried so hard to capture.