Nada Surf

http://www.nadasurf.com/

Intended audience
This is a Web site for a band from New York named Nada Surf so its intended audiences are listeners and fans of the band.

Usefulness of content
The site includes information such as video, contact, message board, songs from each album, tickets and concerts, press, but there is no information at all about the band. There is no band's biography or at least information of the band's members.

Consistency of design
The site's design is based on the graphic on their latest album's cover which is an image of buildings' front. To enter the site or go to different places in the site, you will have to move your mouse across the buildings' front and a small pop-up message will show up from different windows on the buildings. Inside the site, this same mechanism is also at work in that as soon as you enter the site, a new graphic of buildings comes up and on these buildings are signs that you can click on to access different pages on the site. At this point, I think the design is very consistent, however, after you click on each items to go to each page, that's where the inconsistency starts. Some links open up pages that are still within in this site so the design is still consistent with the main page but other pages lead to new windows from their record company, their fan's site to what I presume to be an old version of their site. All these pages are really inconsistent with each other and most of the links in this site end up open up new windows with different design from different sites.

Ease of navigation
The navigation on this site is really confusing. Starting from the home page, apart from having a link to enter the site, there is also a link to listen to songs and watch videos, as well as a pop-up list of songs in their new album which you cannot click on, as well as a link to their MySpace page and a link to the UK version of their site. I don't know why all these things, except from the link to the UK version, should be outside the site and not inside. When I entered the site, the main graphic page comes up with the menu but after I clicked on any of the links on the menu, that main home page is disappear forever. There is no link to go back to the home page. I was instead stuck with the page that I clicked on and the only way to navigate is through clicking at the menu on the top of the page. Another issue is that the links on the menu bar lead to so many different places. The Store and Press links lead to new windows in the record company's site while the Music link opens up another window that looked like their old site, Message Board leads to, again, another window and the Tickets link leads to a fan's site which has nothing to do with tickets at all. So as you can see, this site, even though has a good creative concept of making use of its album graphic, is actually a really bad site to navigate through. In the end, I ended up having to close so many 5 other windows from clicking on the links on the menu bar.