My band's website....

[dgatwood]

Since a bunch of folks post their bands' websites and talk about them here, I thought I'd show off my... um... band... website. Okay, not the usual sort of band you see around here, but....

http://www.ucscwindensemble.org/

Be sure to check out the scrapbook area.

Some fun evil tidbits:

* The "Next Concert" information is automatically updated nightly from the main UCSC web server via an events calendar search using curl.
* The entire scrapbook is custom code, as is the comment system.
* Despite the fact that editing is disabled and the folders are managed manually, the core logic in the scrapbook is the same as my photo gallery on my gatwood.net website.

[warble2]

Where is the site being hosted? I took a look at it, and it took almost 10 seconds for the homepage to load today. I'm on ATT DSL running at 6 Mbps/608 Kbps. Also took over 2 minutes for the JPG image to load (clicked on the image on the homepage). Image is: IMG_4478.JPG

Otherwise, it's a clean easy to navigate site. I know you probably weren't looking for critiques, but by today's standards the load times are fairly slow.

[VSpaceBoy]

Disclaimer:
This page does not represent the views of the University of Santa Cruz, the Regents of the University of California, Gatwood.NET, the author of this page, or anyone else in the known universe. Deal with it. ®

How tactful.. lol

Nice job, site looks great. Trombone huh.. yea, I used to play.

I have to agree, the pic load was quite hefty.

[eeb]

ahhh you're a programmer i'm guessing with all that lingo! hehe


So although you're very excited about all the code you put into the site there's some very bad visuals going on here.

First of all try to stay away from such harsh gradients
Try to design the content of the page so it looks cleaner.. white space is your friend if you use it correctly. (that being said your content on top of the gradient is not the best idea. Try containing it somehow.)

Your navigation is not very good at all simply because it changes from the homepage to the other pages.. big no no. Keep the nav either on the side or on the top

see the difference from your site to the site you linked to http://music.ucsc.edu/

notice how the information flows alot better (not that you'd want your site to look like this but you see what i mean)

I don't mean to rip into your site at all.. so try to take this as constructive critism

[dgatwood]

Originally Posted by warble2

Where is the site being hosted? I took a look at it, and it took almost 10 seconds for the homepage to load today. I'm on ATT DSL running at 6 Mbps/608 Kbps. Also took over 2 minutes for the JPG image to load (clicked on the image on the homepage). Image is: IMG_4478.JPG

Otherwise, it's a clean easy to navigate site. I know you probably weren't looking for critiques, but by today's standards the load times are fairly slow.

It's hosted on my DSL connection, which is 3.0/768, though I probably have bandwidth caps set too low in Apache. I'll tweak that when I get a chance.

[dgatwood]

Originally Posted by eeb

First of all try to stay away from such harsh gradients
Try to design the content of the page so it looks cleaner.. white space is your friend if you use it correctly. (that being said your content on top of the gradient is not the best idea. Try containing it somehow.)

Yeah, it looked nice five years ago, and I think it works for the photos, but it does make the text harder to read. I've been toying with the possibility of bordering the text box and layering it on a translucent neutral deep blue background to set it off from the background and diminish the gradient significantly behind the text.

Originally Posted by eeb

Your navigation is not very good at all simply because it changes from the homepage to the other pages.. big no no. Keep the nav either on the side or on the top

I originally wanted to use the same style for the front page, but that left the page almost completely. Maybe I can come up with some useful text to fill the space. FWIW, I jut looked at the main UCSC page and they did basically the same thing for the same reason.... *sigh*

Ooh, I just noticed the top horizontal line is also in the wrong place on the front page. Whoops. Well, I just added the top navigation to the front page. A little redundant, but it fixes that problem anyway.

Originally Posted by eeb

see the difference from your site to the site you linked to http://music.ucsc.edu/

Yes and no. There's a consistency to it, I'll grant you that. There's both top and side navigation on every page, the color scheme is painful, and the content doesn't scale readily to larger browser windows. Very 2001. I recognize the people from the photos, too, and that's probably about right.

[markusv3000]

interesting site. Alot of blue

I checked it out before but forgot to comment. Looks a lot better than the last time I looked. I'm not crazy about the color scheme but that's a personal taste thing. I don't like the http://music.ucsc.edu/ site. Font is way too small, it's fixed size, and everything just looks too...small.