What’s Up Drake

About What’s Up Drake

How I heard of Drake Bell

In January 2004, “Drake and Josh” premiered on Nickelodeon. The first promotion for the show consisted of a music video of the show's theme song. At the time I did not realize it was a music video and thought Drake Bell and Josh Peck were lipsynching to an oldies song I had never heard of. It was not until Drake was a musical guest on on “All That” that I realized Drake had written that song and had some serious musical talent.

How What’s Up Drake first came about

As I was becoming more and more of a fan, I started scouring the web for more information about Drake. In my search, I found a fansite hosted on Freewebs.com (now Webs.com) and noticed their default footer which said "Wanna make your own website like this one? Click Here". So using a pre-made purple floral template, I made a site and entitled it "Drake Bell" with a subheading of "for everything Drake-related". In addition to gathering news and updates, I started learning HTML.

The name change

After a few years, I was beginning to take notice of several other fansites. They all had interesting names and cool layouts and I wanted my site to have that too, as my current site was starting to seem very generic. I started thinking of a typical user wondering what's been going on with Drake lately and came up with the perfect short phrase to describe it: What's Up Drake?. To further the change, I coded my very first layout.

Domain transferring

Soon after, I began to see the importance of affiliates, and started applying to be one on different fansites of other celebrities I admired. However, I quickly realized that regardless of the quality of my layout, being on Freewebs was having a negative impact on acceptance. I couldn't figure out a tk domain, but I did find co.nr and redirected my site with them.
Later, I found out about fansite-specific free web hosting and felt that starsZZ would be the best fit for my site. It was a subdomain that could become a top-level domain. Two months later, I was able to get a top-level domain since starsZZ partnered with Hollywood.com and gave them out to all their current hostees.

Slight feature growth

I still wasn't getting many page views after a while so I added a gallery to keep things more up-to-date during a news dry spell. I also incorporated Cutenews to help cut down the time it took to post a new update and to further my knowledge and skills

Today

The current layout is geared more toward a usability and information architecture standpoint as well as incorporating a higher level of design. Being much more well-versed in coding, I really wanted to go all out with this. The most important information to a brand new visitor is an introduction, so I moved the welcome message to the top of the page. Supporting Drake has always been my intent with this fansite, so I moved the Support Drake section into a call-to-action slider to grab users' attention on how they can help support Drake. Users who get to the site via search engine may be looking for something specific, so I added a site search to accomodate them. Finally, I made a footer as a more organized way of displaying external links and website information.