This morning, I sat down with my breakfast and my laptop for a pleasure I’d saved up all week.  I was going to check out all the band sites and check out the costumes in detail.  I could barely make my breakfast fast enough–that’s how excited I was about this.

And then I sat down to do it, and my enthusiasm levels dropped a few notches–because my goodness, I had forgotten how frustrating band websites can be.

Can I rant about it?  Sure can, in three points…

Make your sites easy to navigate

I love creative web design.  I recognize effort when I see it.  At the same time, a site’s creative design effort should not force effort on my part when looking at the page.  You can have a creative design without making it frustrating for me to look at your costumes!

I want to see all the sections on one page.  I want to be able to click on each to get a good view of the male, female, and frontlines.  And I don’t want it to take eight years for all the flipping pages/star-studded explosions/fizzling in from the sides pictures to load.  I’m a blogger with no CSS experience, and even I know how to make something like that happen on a very basic level.  If I have to steupse more than three times in the first five clicks of my mouse, I’m just gonna stop looking.

Give us the RIGHT angles and details for ALL costumes–males included!

I want to see all of the costume from afar, maybe from three different angles (two front, one back).  I also want details of every single part of the costume.  I do NOT need three shots of the same basic stuff (model standing up, model reclining on a chair, model making a cat pose).

If there are various options on frontlines and backlines, show one shot of how each would look–it helps your customers see it rather than just visualize it.  I may think a costume will look really cute with the small headpiece, but I might think twice if I see it compared to the larger headpiece.

And as for the men… well, I know it’s likely to be bad quality when I see it in person, so please show me what it will have been designed as—in its entirety, as if it were a female costume—so I can buy enough UHU and glue gun sticks.

Your site should launch IMMEDIATELY after the band launch

Band launches on Friday night at 11 pm?  That site should be up and running by 8 the next day–and make that 5 am if you want Saucy talking about it.

People, this is just plain old good business sense.  When you launch, the faithful want to see the costumes over and over again, up close.  They want to keep buzzing on what they’ve seen.  They want to compare notes with friends.  They want to make their top choice their screensaver.  Do you really want them relying on photos taken by launch attendees or bloggers, photos whose quality may not reflect the band’s costumes at their best? It is mind-boggling to me that bands that launched weeks ago still don’t have their sites fully updated, much less UP.  Carnival is routine to these bands—they all know what should happen, and when.  Plan accordingly.

I want to go all “ooh and ahh” over these sites.  I don’t want them to set off a sea of steupsing from me.  Please, bands, get with the program–your  costumes (and your business) deserve much better.