I've got me some websites.

[VomitHatSteve]

I've finally finished setting up my band websites to the point where I'm pretty much happy with them.

Regdar and the Fighters - This band is poppy, catchy nerd rock.

Homo Deprecatus - This is my serious (read "kind of angsty"), Christian band. The site is kind of in an embryonic state since I'm still waiting for some art to be completed.

Feedback and constructive criticism are appreciated. Thanks.

 

[eeb]

I'll give you some constructive critism. Keep in mind that i do not mean to rip on your sites. This is what I do for a living so take some free advice from a designer.


okay I'll start with the regdar and the fighters (fun band name btw)

The logo is super busy and hard to read.. not to mention the color contrast makes it even harder. Speaking of color NEVER NEVER USE BLACK TEXT ON BLUE this is near impossible to read.

You don't need all that copywrite text to be so big. It's actually the part of the site that sticks out the most and it's the least important.. make that much smaller.

again the biggest issue is the color contrast..

now i'll talk about the homo deprecatus site

first off the graphics are terrible.. I'm sorry to say but it's really rough looking. you might want to rethink it.. think simple.. simplicity is always better than a complex idea. Another thing is your page breaks in firefox. I saw you're little disclaimer at the bottom.. That's very unprofessional.. you can make properly written code look just fine. (especially in firefox which is a web standard complient browser)

the idea is fine.. and unlike the other site the text is great and looks organized. You just need to rework the graphics a bit and look at the code for the footer (where the site breaks for me)

again i'm sorry if this came across rude.. just trying to help..

 

[JTC111]

I'll give you some constructive critism. Keep in mind that i do not mean to rip on your sites. This is what I do for a living so take some free advice from a designer.

I'd be grateful for some constructive criticism of my site.
Jim Caputo

 

[VomitHatSteve]

Thanks for the advice.

Unfortunately, I can't do too much about the graphics since I had a friend doing those (they'd be even worse if I did them!)

I think the text color is actually a dark red on Regdar and the fighters, but yeah, you're right about it being hard to read. Do you have any recommendations as to what would be an easier color to read?

How does the HD page break? I checked it in Firefox (2.0.0.14), IE 6, Safari, and Opera, and it looks the same. I haven't checked it with lower resolutions, if that's the problem.

As much as Firefox may claim to be standards compliant, I'm not sure that it is. Either that or the standards need to be reworked. Firefox does re-interpret HTML that it thinks is "wrong" (It has to in order to be a general-use browser). And I've seen cases where it has second guessed the coder too much and broken a page.

Again, thank you for your help, eeb. I'll post again when I've tweaked things a little.

For your page, Jim, I'd probably cut back on the flash and other large objects on the front page. It was a bit slow to load.

 

[JTC111]

For your page, Jim, I'd probably cut back on the flash and other large objects on the front page. It was a bit slow to load.

Thanks Steve, although I was actually asking EEB since he's a web designer. I don't have any flash stuff on my front page but I do have a music file from my cd that loads up and plays automatically. I like the idea of having someone hear the music when they find my site, so I'm not looking to change that.

As for the load time, I have cable and it loads up very quickly. The bad side to that is that I have no idea how long it takes for other ISP devices.

 

[VomitHatSteve]

Hey! I'm a web designer. Just not a good or paid one!

I didn't have headphones on when I checked your site, so I just assumed it was flash that made it go slowly. Playing the songs straight up would explain it. It was probably quicktime then. Quicktime always lags on my PC.

So I updated my sites with some of eeb's suggestions: smaller font for the legal text, different wordings there, some better color choices, etc. Continued feedback is always appreciated.

If anyone wants to give feedback on the music too, I'd be happy for that.