Student Critiques: Five Lines & The Evolution of Dance
Five Lines Henry Thiemann
Concept I don’t have much experience searching for sheet music, but the few times that I have had to find sheet music, I have found it very difficult. It is difficult finding free sheet music (even for songs without copyright), and I haven’t even attempted to find non-vocal sheet music. I really like the concept of your site! It provides a solution to a tangible problem, uses the internet’s crowd sourcing capabilities, and has the potential for a lot of growth if you decide to continue it beyond this class.
Audience Definition The audience is well defined. You’ve broken it down into two groups—experienced musicians who will create transcriptions and less experienced musicians who will use these transcriptions—and addressed how the site will cater to each group. In your business plan you also addressed how each of these groups will contribute to the continued financial maintenance of the site.
Project Plan You have a very clear idea of the site’s purpose and how it will function. By the way, I loved your video! It was entertaining and did an excellent job of laying out the purpose and functionality of the website.
Site Organization At the moment, the site is not finished, so I will base my review of the site’s organization off of your Website Outline. From what I can tell from this outline, the site will be well organized. For the information subpages, I would suggest having more descriptive titles. Alternatively, you could have the browsing/searching functionality on a different page and use the homepage to introduce the site (including the video) and give short descriptions (a couple of sentences maybe) of its informational subpages.
Clarity of Writing No web pages to look at yet, but your homework assignments are well written and convey all the necessary information in a concise manner.
Ethics The site seems perfectly ethical to me. In your business plan and site outline, you bring up the issue of legality and state that copyrights will be attained through site membership fees.
Potential Risks/Problems The site seems like a fantastic idea! My only concern is that, for the purpose of this class, you may not have enough material. You could solve this problem by expanding on your informational pages. Also, since this is a mock-up site for the time being, I’m wondering how many transcriptions you will actually upload. Since the majority of pages on the site would be these transcriptions, the site may appear to have fewer pages than it actually would.
The Evolution of Dance Tony Tran
Concept From looking through your homework assignments and website, I see that your website concept has changed quite a bit over time. On your homepage, you say the site will explore the history of dance in general, and more recently, the history of the relationship between dance, the media, and the Internet. I think it is important to include all of this for the site to have depth, but I think it would be a good idea to also include some embedded YouTube instructional dance videos. From your market analysis, it seemed that you were headed in this direction, but after looking at the site I couldn’t tell if you were still planning on including this or not.
Audience Definition The audience demographic makes sense. Teenagers definitely account for most dance video views. Along the lines of my “concept” criticism, I think the target audience would change slightly, depending on whether this is more of an informational, instructional, community, (or combination of these three) site.
Project Plan The project plan was written when you were planning on discussing dance groups at Stanford. I liked this idea, but I like the direction you’ve gone in now more.
Site Organization I’m assuming you have a lot of content to add. The design of the site looks great! I love the image you have in the background and next to the site title. I think that “dancing influences” should have its own separate page that clarifies what you mean by “influence.” From what I could tell, you are referring specifically to media in the past decade. I would suggest adding “So You Think You Can Dance!” ABDC is one of my favorite shows by the way. I think you should also have a few sections where you could discuss how the various media influences you mentioned have affected/been affected by certain styles of dance and how these dance styles have evolved over the past decade. You could embed a lot of different videos tracking how dance styles have changed (for example, videos with 1990s hip hop versus modern hip hop). Also, in addition to “personal stories” you could have pages for uploading/embedding instructional videos. Lastly, I wasn’t sure about the difference between your history of dance page and the evolution of dance page.
Clarity of Writing The site is still in its early stages. I’m sure you plan on adding more information on the influence pages. For the history page, I think you need to “webify” it a bit. It’s kind of repetitive at the beginning. I think you could use more concrete information about different eras of dance and the development of different styles over time. This could be done over the course of many short pages, with each page dedicated to a different era or style. Then I suppose “evolution of dance” would focus solely on how modern media and Internet has revolutionized dance?
Ethics Good. Just be careful if you embed links from TV shows. I’m not sure about copyright around that. If you can, try to use links from the shows’ YouTube channels.
Potential Risks/Problems I think I’ve stated this pretty clearly in the above sections. Just try to clarify how you will balance out information versus instruction. This is all tied to what purpose you want your site to serve.