Posted by Dublin Drupaller on January 22, 2010 at 11:15am
This isn't a Drupal site, but, I was blown away by the elegance in the layout and design. A superb example of a simple but very good site.
Apart from the general look n feel, I like the way the iconised navigation is implemented. Superb.
Great music too!
When I get time, I might have a bash at recreating a simple Album previews player for a Drupal artist site using similar ideas. In other words, when someone clicks on "preview album" links, they don't get the standard list of tracks with a button...they are presented with something resembling thesixtyone.com
Dub
Comments
Well I have surfed to the
Well I have surfed to the site and been there 5 minutes and still have no clue what they wanna tell me. But maybe thats just my stupidness.
did you skip the first page?
I think there is a clue on the very first page of the site...i.e.
http://www.thesixtyone.com/
iow....it's all about the music.
dub
Hello Dub, I to didn't get
Hello Dub,
I to didn't get what the site was for until you just told us. I assumed "the sixty one" was a music group or band of some sort... I didn't know new artist could put up music and listeners decide what's good.... that is a great concept. Much like voting on vids at youtube, only this is for new music artists... I like.
My mistake was not reading the huge text when you first visit the site... I just clicked enter lol.
nice!
I've been marveling at this site as well. Well done, though some of the navigation is not so intuitive at first. There's much more to the site than you first see, and you've got to dig to find it all.
I'm especially intrigued by the full-frame background pictures. When I get a free moment, i'd like to do an autopsy and see how they did it.
album cover vibe...
I really like the album cover vibe. as an aside for the younger Drupallers, when I was buying music, there was a big thing about listening to a full album, from beginning to end and usually scanning the album cover for lyrics and clues to what was going through their heads when they were making the album. in other words the album cover was REALLY important. that sorta died with CDs and even more with mp3.
the front page is probably preloading the first few images. There's about 5 or 6 seconds when people go "wtf?" and then they read the statement before continuing...which is ample time to load 3 large images and the UI scripts (is it jquery or prototype?) and maybe even the first 10 seconds of the first song...so when you click to enter...everything appears to happen instantly.
i really like it. there's a wonderful intuitiveness to the navigation and it draws you in a little...until you realise that there's videos...free/buy m3p downloads...tour dates...and so on. As well as a music discovery engine built in.
very slick.
True I am amazed at how huge
True I am amazed at how huge the background images are and yet it doesn't seem to slow down the loading... or does background images no matter how big load quickly?
nice find
This is a great interface...reminds me of walking into a local record store and putting on headphones at the listening station while looking at the album covers and reading the info about them. The large graphics w/ overlay text does something to hook you in, and minimizes distracting menus and interfaces.
Interesting, I found the old version of the sixty one site. It looks like a pretty standard myspace-y clone type site. It's amazing how as a casual listener, the old site does very little to draw me in. On the new version of the site it is a much more feature rich experience and I'm already looking forward to visiting the site again soon.
http://old.thesixtyone.com/
That /#/ Browsing
I really like how fast the site is, it all seems to be loading instantaneously through AJAX or something? All the pages are ancor links, /#/. Does this type of browsing have a name?
I suspect...
I suspect it's all AJAX... the href=# is a good indication. Sadly the existing user base is a little pissed with the recent changes. See http://old.thesixtyone.com to see what they're holding on too. Funny how people hate change in general... personally I love the newsixtyone.com.
yensdesign.com—creating-ajax-
yensdesign.com—creating-ajax-websites-based-on-anchor-navigation http://yensdesign.com/2008/11/creating-ajax-websites-based-on-anchor-navigation/
blog.rebeccamurphey.com—anchor-based-url-navigation-with-jquery http://blog.rebeccamurphey.com/2007/12/04/anchor-based-url-navigation-with-jquery/
After some hunting, definitely AJAX! Both LALA and TheSixtyOne use this style of browsing. Is it possible in Drupal?
Answering my own questions
Answering my own questions here but leaving a trace in case others are curious:
http://benalman.com/projects/jquery-bbq-plugin/
yea.. to be honest. i'm more
yea.. to be honest. i'm more crazy with their older one.
for the new one, if it's already not intuitive for most of us here who deals with the internet 25hrs/day, then imagine how would it be like for the pure musicians?
Heh
I was beginning to wonder if I was the only one that thought the new version is awful. The older one is much better. And I'm not a user of the site clinging to the old way... Just someone who clicked the link in this thread out of curiosity.
Michelle
I luv this site
I love the new site. I wonder How they did it? it's not slowing down. is it all in ajax?
Yes, AJAX
Yes, it's all AJAX. That kind of AJAX reloading of parts (most) of pages is readily available with the new #ajax stuff in Drupal 7.
Awesome.
Awesome.
It's great if you know that
It's great if you know that it is built around social media. Although its "mission statement" is not so clear. At first glance, I wondered "so is it a label, a band, a studio, what is it?"
High definition pictures would make it more attractive as I first thought it was taking some time to download the picture, but that was not the case.
The sidebars disappear too fast and you don't know how to interact with the current page.
It's good how random content shows up.
Why I'd change (IMO):