Re: band websites


surf wrote:
This is our current band website that our drummer had this guy put
together.
I did a little work on it as well:

www.freesprtrocks.net

Then our drummer said some conenctions of his in the industry where
going to
link our site ti theirs, but we needed a more professional site. More
recently
they have been saying we need a shnazier site with video clips and so
on in order to get good gigs. They don't seem to me to elaborate on
exactly what a good site is, but hold up
sites like carmine appice web site: http://www.carmineappice.net
or aerosmith as examples. I've done a bunch of HTML and cgi scripting
myself,
and recently bought javascript and web development books. I also have a
1.5 inch thick
HTML reference book and another book on CSS style sheets and HTML.
Despite that, I am still learning and am mainly a C++/Java/Perl
developer at work
rather than a web develpment expert. I have an interest in learning,
but they seem to want
to get a site up in 2 weeks or something and I am somewhat apprehensive
because
they seem vague about the details of what they want and I don't want to
spend my entire
weekends working on a web site. They want to spend $1500 on a site that
I presume will have flash, this guy is supposedly going to cut us a
deal on the building the site for that much. I had doubts about how
important such a site would be or if it would neccessarily even get
alot of traffic just because it has flash etc. I figured there must be
tons of great bands with mediocre sites, and lots of medicore bands
with great site, but I decided to post this on here to see what people
might say as I am not really sure.

The overall design is fine but you have some technical issues...

- First, you need to take a look at the site in Firefox. It used to be
that you could design for just IE and blow off the rest, but Firefox
has quite a few users. This is most evident on the sub pages.

- You should design for a smaller screen resolution. The site looks
like it was designed using 1600x1200 (I use that at home but here at
work I'm at 1280x1024) and everything looks pretty big overall. Most
people are using around 1024x768 and there are even some folks still at
800x600 at my office.

- Don't resize large images to smaller dimensions using HTML. You're
forcing your viewers to download images that are much larger in file
size than they need to be; resize the actual images to the size you
want them to be on your site.

- Consider compressing the photo jpegs on the home page some more.
You're using four of them there which average around 100k each - nearly
half a meg in total - which is a killer for a dialup user. Splitting
up a large image into several smaller ones is a good idea though as
you'll take advantage of the browser's threading capabilities.

.