While browsing the WordPress showcase and notable users’ sites, I couldn’t help but be surprised about what major businesses, brands, and political sites use WordPress. Sites by CNN, General Motors, Forbes and Ebay are all WordPress sites. One that really stuck out to me was the website for Lollapalooza (Lolla). Lollapalooza is an annual music festival featuring heavy metal, alternative, punk and hip-hop music. It’s held at Grant Park in Chicago.
One thing that stands out immediately from the website is the color scheme and aesthetic. It matches the personality of the bulk of their audience- a younger, millennial/gen Z audience. There’s a mini video montage that is on a loop of their website, highlighting the positives of the experience. If I were to speak with the website manager of Lolla, the only thing I’d recommend is perhaps changing the color scheme of the website- perhaps yearly. This way it remains fresh and gives personality to each year’s lineup.
Given the genre of this website, I’d recommend it to friends only. This goes back to the audience of the Lolla, though they won’t turn away people who are older! Especially since it’s an easy site to read and navigate. There is, however, another WordPress website that appeals more to a broad audience. This notable website is the New York Times website.
The New York Times (NYT) is arguably the number one newspaper outlet in the United States & perhaps the world as well. Compared to a site like Lollapalooza’s, where there is much more of a “limit” on how much content they can put up, NYT has a lot more data and content to their website. They have many different categories of news to separate their articles, such as, World, U.S., Business, Politics, Health, Art, and a few more. If I were to recommend anything to the developers of this website, it’d be to find a way to make the homepage less busy. It appears their format is to make it look like a newspaper, but it looks overwhelming when you first get on the website. I’d also suggest a very mini tutorial on how to use the website when someone first logs on, to ensure everyone knows how to navigate their site with ease.
Tomisin's Tips 