The Shabby Start and Pleasant Present of NME.com
I chose NME.com as my website and delved into its past. NME is New Musical Express a print and online music magazine based out of the UK.
The first screenshot that I took was from 1996, the first year of the website’s existence, and the forty-fourth year of the magazine’s existence. The screenshot shows a typical webpage from the late nineties, a few bright colors on a black background — not visually appealing, verging on hard to look at. The links are all emphasized with highlighter-esque colors and the use of bold, underline, and italics seems much appreciated by the webpage designers. I found it interesting that one of the stories is advertised with the line, “we party like it’s 1999 with TRICKY’s gothic ‘Pre-Millenium Tension’”, a definite sign of the times. All of the information is spread out in paragraph form with the links scattered throughout, so you essentially have to read it all to find what you may be interested in.
The next two screenshots come from 1998 and 1999, by this point the designers finally understood that, as an online magazine, it was necessary to create headlines to streamline the information. The colors and visuals are slightly better, not so harsh due to the change from a black background to white. It is beginning to look more like a news website rather than every other website that was on the web at this time, which were basically all just large blocks of text.
By 2003 it seems like NME finally determined what colors to use as branding for their magazine. A red and white theme is dominate here (with a black background) and they are still smartly employing the use of headlines which are now squared off and separated even more. Culturally interesting are the headlines announcing the “re-launch” of Napster and Limp Bizkit being forced to leave a hostile Chicago show. Oddly, even though this is from 2003, which seems recent, the website is still not that visually appealing or streamlined simply. Webpages are still slightly chaotic in nature, in what is an attempt, at least it seems to me, to look technologically advanced and savvy.
By 2007 NME locked down the look that they would keep for the foreseeable future. There is a lot of compartmentalization and hierarchies of what news is most breaking or important. They realized the mistake that was using a black background and made the website much more appealing to the user. Culturally, it is interesting to note the headline about the 67th anniversary of John Lennon’s death being honored along with a headline about the band Arctic Monkeys years before they blew up to the rock stars that they are today, they are pictured and described as young, new up and comers. Additionally, the website had gotten rid of most of the obnoxious colors, which creates a more sophisticated and newsworthy news magazine. The mellow colors make them seem less like a fan page and more like a reliable news source.
From 2007 to the present page, not much has drastically changed, however the slight changes that did occur actually say a lot about the media devices that are used to view the page. The webpage no longer weighs to the left side, but now it fits the entire screen, catering to those viewing on a widescreen computer, which is the norm for laptops today. Now that NME is established as a reliable news source for music fans, the website has transformed from the obnoxiously juvenile page it once was into a simplistic and informative news site, easy on the eyes and modern in design.
