Function Central

Function Central are live music experts who provide live bands, musicians & DJs for weddings, parties and corporate events.

I was asked to redevelop their brand and design a new website, positioning them as a professional, reliable and approachable company amongst some strong competition.

Putting the user at the centre

Being very aware of their competition, the guys at Function Central already had ideas in mind for creating similar functionality to competing sites. After exploring the competing sites myself, I wasn't convinced that users were taking advantage of the feature sets, or that the sites were particularly usable. I decided to conduct a set of small, informal user tests on three competing sites using the indispensable Silverback, and it quickly became painfully obvious that users found each of the sites too busy, daunting and often confusing. The pages were so dense with information (often for the sake of SEO), that users struggled to get basic information.

I wanted to take a much more user-centered approach with Function Central's site, aiming to avoid the feeling of "information overload" that my test participants had felt. By providing users with concise 'help yourself' functionality like the 'Find an act' form, users could quickly get results and immediately feel as though they're in control of the site, not the other way around.

Laying the foundations

Before beginning to look at the design, I produced a set of wireframes. These helped define all of the required page elements and page hierarchies. With a little extra functionality, I also allowed the client to click through the site in their browser, giving them a clear idea of the different paths through the site and relationships of the various sections.

Designing for the audience

More than half of Function Central's bookings come from brides and grooms seeking musical acts for their weddings, so the company needed to appear reliable, attractive and modern enough to satisfy this specific group. It was essential that the design convey the fun of hiring an act, but also that the guys at Function Central have time to help guide you to the perfect act choice for your event.

A major challenge of the design was how to provide plenty of keyword-rich content that would ensure the company could compete in organic search result listings, without the site appearing as cluttered and dense as competing sites. One solution which helped solve this issue was to use unobtrusive show/hide panels, allowing all HTML on the page to be machine-readable, but with any potentially excessive information hidden from the user on load of the page. Crafting a strong typographic hierarchy and using well-considered negative space also went a long way to creating clear divisions in the content and prominent signposting of content blocks.

Building the templates

After the page designs were signed off, I began building the templates. Almost 70% of Function Central's visitors use a version of Internet Explorer older than version 8, so my usual method of building the templates with several different browsers open at one time was particularly important in this case. By writing semantically rich markup (including microformatted content where possible) and building the templates with a clear separation between the content (HTML) and style (CSS), we already had a strong organic SEO advantage over their competitors' bloated markup.

Fresh Monkey handled all template integration, front-end trickery and the build of a superb CMS, perfectly tailored for managing Function Central's large catalogue of acts.

Approaching the re-brand

Having talked with the guys at the company at length throughout the investigation, wireframing and design stages of the site, I had a clear idea of the kind of values their branding should project.

After a fair bit of sketching, I hit upon a concept which I felt made the company feel established and professional, but also communicated the musical nature of their business. After providing the client with two mocked-up variations of the marque concept, a third revision amalgamating the first and second was eventually signed off.

Adding the company name was the final step. I knew early on that the traditional feel of a serif typeface wouldn't be right, and I'd failed to find a sans-serif that communicated enough 'fun' without feeling clichéd. After a long search for a suitable slab-serif, I came upon Type Together's beautiful Adelle family, and settled on the Extra Bold weight to finish the logo off.

Project gallery

I've created a set of Flickr documenting the design and build process of Function Central, which you can view below.

Software

Technologies