For Kavinda Wewegama- Cardinal Music: A Portal for Stanford Music
INTRODUCTION:
The layout for this kind of site is effective. Upon arriving at this website, users will want to jump straight into the music features and not have to deal with cluttered info; the front page facilitates that, and the links on the side make it clear that information is available should the user want to access it. For future functionality, you might consider changing the "Assignments" header to something like "About Cardinal Music."
WRITING STYLE:
Your writing should be more direct and objective. In the Background section, for example, you don't have to use the phrase "one can argue" when opening up with the sentences about music history. You should say that the early beginnings of the music history "is traced back to" instead, which maintains your authority on the matter. On objectiveness, your site is of a functional nature; users want to visit it to use its features, not to dissect opinions or anything of the sort. Avoid phrases like "unsurprisingly" and keep your writing purely informational, because should users browse the Background or Business Plan sections, they'd want pure information.
A good way to cater to the user is to break down your background page into more distinguishable and concise categories. Users may get impatient trying to dissect all of that information, especially with the long bullet points. Bullet must should be kept a bit shorter, so shorten the ones you have and perhaps create more (on the Background page, specifically).
BACKGROUND:
I don't feel that you need the opening sentences on the history of music. They are randomly placed; plus, it's a big jump talking about ancient history and then fast-forwarding to music on the Internet. It may confuse other readers; I initially thought it was going to be a paragraph about music history.
You talk about more than just background (such as the Future section) in the Background page. You could consider renaming it to something more general, like "Overview."
BUSINESS PLAN AND OUTLINE:
I'm curious about the idea of charging artists a small fee for archiving on the site, and how that will work. I don't know too much about the matter, but would that price be competitive enough to make artists want to archive on Cardinal Music versus a larger and more universal music distributor? There are music sites like www.imeem.com and www.last.fm that these artists could theoretically use. It's an issue that is influenced by many factors, but I think it will be a challenge to convince artists to stay within the Stanford music portal when they might feel ambitious and aim for a larger, more universal and established music featurer (with a larger audience) instead.
Advertising might be tricky. Because the website is so focused and targeted toward such a specific group, it will be difficult to get sponsors for the site when they can opt to back a site with a broader focus and target group. Those sponsors would then get their name out to more people. Your target audience is the Stanford community, so consider advertisers who also desire to target Stanford specifically. Collaboration with groups like the Stanford Student Union or the Stanford Concert Network would be really interesting. I really like the idea of mass on-campus advertising like the ULoop group does, as you mentioned during your in-class presentation. That way, students and artists would know that there is a Cardinal Music portal tailored specifically for them, versus general iTunes usage or the like.
OVERALL:
The idea behind the website is a focused one catering to a very specific audience. Doing that focuses energy on quality instead of scope, and it really shows in your site. You've really thought about all the details and aspects going into Cardinal Music. It's appealing to the user and I would definitely sign on to use it! Awesome work!