New Website, Need Input

GazEcc

GazEcc

mBallstát atá tiomanta
Good Evening HR,

Hope I find you all well this evening, I've been gigging like mad lately and am bloody thankful for it but its meant I've had little time to post but one of my projects has been getting my bands website off the ground and I wanted to ask you all what you though of the design thus far,

I'm far from a professional web designer but have worked hard to get this up and running, but i'm getting the web equivalent of ear fatigue, I can only see what I want to see and would love some fresh [strike]ears[/strike], er eyes to help me make it better.

I have a few planned improvements, the buttons are going, the nav bar is getting an update and when the bassist gets some photos's I'll probably add them for a break from the writing, that and I need to add a hell of a lot of content, anyway here the link guys.

Oh and I'm buying the .ie domain aswell so it'll be http://boozebrothers.ie in a week or two :)

My Bands Site :) a HR Exclusive :P
 
Pics, videos and tunes will go a long way towards completing the site. Good start.

Be sure to add the link to your signature. No one will look at it, but crossing the I's and dotting the T's sort of thing.

Cool,
:)
 
Ah I'm gonna wait until I have the .ie before adding it to the sig, and until it has some more content. why drive traffic to an empty site? (except in this thread of course :P)
 
Add link, photos, videos and other essential information that a visitor like to see on website.
Website must be attractive and don't take time for loading. Apply latest features just like PHP, Javascript.

It is the best way to promote your music on large scale within short period of times.
 
Apply latest features just like PHP, Javascript.
Click to expand...
That sentence is completely devoid of meaningful content.

That's like telling him to add the latest features like notes and guitars to his songs.

The site looks clean and organized. Obviously, it'll look better once you get some content up there. :D

The one big thing that seems to be missing is an obvious "listen to our music" link. You don't want people to have to look for that for more than 2 seconds.

The server also seems to have some issues. I got a lot of "The server is too busy" errors.

Did you code this yourself? You've got something like 3 sets of <head> and <body> tags on the front page. That's not a good idea!
 
It loaded right up for me - from my work server, that's pretty good. Agreed with others - pictures, videos and music shoudl be easy to find.
 
VomitHatSteve said:
That sentence is completely devoid of meaningful content.

That's like telling him to add the latest features like notes and guitars to his songs.

The site looks clean and organized. Obviously, it'll look better once you get some content up there. :D

The one big thing that seems to be missing is an obvious "listen to our music" link. You don't want people to have to look for that for more than 2 seconds.

The server also seems to have some issues. I got a lot of "The server is too busy" errors.

Did you code this yourself? You've got something like 3 sets of <head> and <body> tags on the front page. That's not a good idea!
Click to expand...

yeah I done it myself. Webdesign is far from my forté, the 3 sets of <head><body> is probably the fact that i'm calling on 3/4 different html pages using the php include() tag, to call common elements such as the header, it was an unintentional artifact.

The Server is free hosted server 000webhost or something. When I buy the domain I'll either buy a better server or build my own, And I suppose the listen to our choones could be more obvious at the mo its just a sound cloud link, but thanks for the input :) the big issue is the Biography, the lads think its too cocky and ostentatious I should tone it down, but I'm not really sure what I should be writing, I kinda felt it should make us seem 'larger than life' to try encourage people to come to the gigs / book us

The only other issue is on the gigs and bio page, the buttons seem not to fit with the overall design.
 
mjbphotos said:
It loaded right up for me - from my work server, that's pretty good. Agreed with others - pictures, videos and music shoudl be easy to find.
Click to expand...

Hmm... seems to be the common train of thought, well there goes my day :P *sticks head into code*
 
Yeah. Your goal in getting people to your site is to get them listening to your music, right? So that should be the simplest and most obvious thing to do when they get there. (Although, you want to avoid auto-play because that tends to annoy folks.)
 
Along with the pictures, videos, and music you should also add some kind of email subscribe link so you can capture email addresses and continue marketing your band's music to your visitors over a period of time instead of just once.
 
The others have made good points.

The site is clean and uncluttered, so you are off to a good start.

However, some extra things worth thinking about:

1 Check out about the choice of colours and their effect on test readability. White text on a black background, somewhat counter-intuitively, is not the best for readability.

2 Check out the relationship between readability, font size and line length. Think about preventing the lengths from automatically fitting different screen widths, i.e. make the text block width an absolute, rather than relative, dimension.

3 Try to avoid the self-promoting puff. After all, all bands are going to claim they are fantastic on their websites. Focus on your band's professionalism. Let the pix and soundbites confirm this when you get them up.
 
The site looks pretty good. I would suggest changing you background picture; It take a lot of attention from the text. The text looks draw on so you could play with that look when thinking of backgrounds. Everyone is absolutely right about being able to find music, videos, pics and more. Whenever you start a marketing campaign you need to identify you customer, and then put yourself in their shoes. How does you site look to your fans? Can they easily navigate it? Once they get to your site, why would they choose to follow your band or what would keep them at your site?
 
alignment and font.

you should have 3 neat columns: "This Week!" should align with the dates, and the dates should have a different, subordinate size/font. Your social media icons should align with the "Our Other Sites" text.

maybe borders b/w the columns? some text runs together on my monitor.

i would remove the hazy background image and work 1 strong, sharp image onto your homepage. and, with a more consistent background, you'll have more freedom in designing your font hierarchy.

and remove every bullet point on the entire site.
 
agree completely.

i found it very hard to read some of the text. the choice in background kind of distracted the rest of the content. my manager works in IT as a business analyst, and he always tells me that he assumes everyone is stupid. meaning that everything made for users should be user friendly and extremely intuitive.

not sure about the choice in the domain name. never heard of .ie.

the website my manager put together can be found thru the youtube link in my channel. ptc204.com. it lacks colour, but i cared more about simplicity and ease of finding things. maybe a similar layout could work.

but otherwise, everything else is solid. there isnt too much clutter at all and is laid out pretty well.

gecko zzed said:
The others have made good points.

The site is clean and uncluttered, so you are off to a good start.

However, some extra things worth thinking about:

1 Check out about the choice of colours and their effect on test readability. White text on a black background, somewhat counter-intuitively, is not the best for readability.

2 Check out the relationship between readability, font size and line length. Think about preventing the lengths from automatically fitting different screen widths, i.e. make the text block width an absolute, rather than relative, dimension.

3 Try to avoid the self-promoting puff. After all, all bands are going to claim they are fantastic on their websites. Focus on your band's professionalism. Let the pix and soundbites confirm this when you get them up.
Click to expand...
 
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