Re: My Viol Consort's Website

Thanks for your detailed comments -- they are *very* helpful.
Pedantic is *good*.

Ciaran McHale <ciaran_mchale@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:Xns9BEB88530F563ciaranmchaleyahoocou@xxxxxxxxxxxxx:

In a word, yes. You need to get with the times. Re-implement the
website with Ruby on Rails and drag all the content out of a
database. I mean, a static website in which pages load fast? What
the hell is that all about? And where are the popup ads?

Ack! When I started reading, I really thought you were serious. You
wouldn't believe how the people who do web design for a living are
so invested in the technologies they use and completely unable to
fit the correct implementation strategy to the content.

Joking aside, it looks fine and the recording quality of the MP3
tracks are professionally high (at least to my untrained ear).

Should I run a high-pass filter on the live recordings to remove the
rumble? This is one thing that bothers me.

Also, I feel like the live recordings, despite having lower audio
quality, poorer tuning, and more ensemble problems, are much more
interesting to listen to than the 5-track studio recording.

Here are a few comments (in increasing order of pedanticalness) to
consider.

*Please* associate the names of the group members with the photos.
I'd suggest one of two things. Underneath the full-group photo,
add a caption that names each individual. Alternatively, and this
would be my preference, have an individual head-shot photo beside
each biography on the About page.

I'll have to think about this. One of the problems is that the
personnel is not fixed and permanent. The 6-part group will cease to
exist after this semester as one of the players is graduating, and
one of the others' status is unknown. We may have other players
stepping in. This is bog standard for early music groups -- they
send out publicity photos all the time that include people in them
that are no longer in the group, or that won't be playing on the
particular concert being publicized (I know this because our groups
director does all the publicity for Music Before 1800).

Why do you provide partial-group photos as well as a full-group
photo?

Because each of those groups is an independent performing ensemble,
able to represent the group as a whole. Indeed, the 3-part group is
the one that performs the most. The 4-part group is the only other
one that is guaranteed to remain in perpetuity. This is one of the
problems of incorporating students into the group -- they come and
go, they graduate, etc.

Doesn't that invite the risk of a publication reproducing
one of the partial-group photos, which might annoy any members
who did not get their face included? I'd suggest removing the
partial-group photos and instead provide a selection of full-group
photos.

This is representative of a problem that comes from the fact that
the person making the decisions for what goes where is the director
and not me. The photo page started out as a press page (as Andrew
discovered from the bad link) because Margaret has been very annoyed
at all the groups she has to promote who don't provide press
materials on their websites. I didn't want to provide links to the
TIFFs, because TIFFs are not web graphics (though Safari can display
them), and the size of the TIFFs is for print (don't even ask about
the fact that they are 72dpi -- I started the photo editing and had
them at 300dpi, but that got taken over by Margaret and she
apparently forgot to save them at 300dpi) and not for onscreen
display. I said the files should be stored where they are and that
links to them should be sent to any press people as needed. As a
publicity person, she wanted them immediately accessible, without
having to ask for the link.

I don't like having all the photos in one place, honestly. I'd like
to have them displayed elsewhere on the site, too. And I've also
been looking for other photos, non-posed, but we just don't have any
good ones, or the decent ones too prominently feature players who
have left the group (if you're interested, some not-very-good
pictures from our December concert are at
http://tearesofthemuses.com/Graphics/HolieEve/Tuning02.jpg).

You have a "Home" link on each page, which is good. However, it is
at the bottom of the page, and some people might expect to find it
at the top of the page. I'd suggest leaving the row of links at
the bottom of the page where they are, but also turning "The
Teares of the Muses" title near the top of the page into a link
(use CSS to disable the blue text color and underline for that
particular link).

This raises a number of issues. I prefer to have navigation both at
top and bottom, but Margaret finds multiple paths to the same
location extremely annoying. We had a fight over this. However,
there's a major problem with the design, with the border at the top
leaving no place to put the top nav (I guess it could go in a
horizontal row above the top border, but that would be visually
jarring, seems to me).

Philosophically I also am against links that are not visually
obvious as links, i.e., that you have to mouse over to know it's a
link. That said, my own business website violates this, but in a way
that is conventional (graphics in the left-column nav bar) and
everyone knows how to use.

I am also philosophically against rollovers because if you haven't
violated the rule of making your links visually identifiable as
links, all a rollover tells you is "Look! Your mouse pointer is
here!" which is something I already know. If things are ambiguous as
to what the mouse is over, then you have a different design problem,
so rollovers seem to me to be a solution to a problem created by
mistakes in the first place (kind of like MS's grouping of taskbar
buttons in WinXP, caused by the stupid decision to use the
single-document interface, which multiplies the number of taskbar
buttons; but I digress).

But in this case, I think I'll violate my personal rule and do
exactly what you say, along with a mouseover event to underline it.

The mission statement says you want to "introduce the elegant and
lively music for viols to new audiences." I know nothing at all
about that genre of music so I don't know if I am representative
of the intended "new audiences". If I am representative then your
intended new audiences: (1) may not know what the word "viols"
means, and (2) might be interested in how the name of the group
was chosen. You are in a better position than me to know if the
website should be updated to explain (1) and (2).

I think this is an excellent point. I'm going to forward it on to
Margaret, if you don't mind.

Whenever I'm on the way to or from rehearsals/performances, I always
get asked if I'm carrying a guitar (I'm playing tenor viol these
days in the group and only play my bass at home), and I have to
explain that it's a tenor viol, which is part of the viola da gamba
family, and it's played like a cello, blah blah blah. I decided a
long time ago that I should make up a brochure that I could hand out
to people. This would have two benefits:

1. it could explain far better (with pictures) than I can verbally
in a few words, AND

2. it would work as promotional material for our consort.

If I could ever get that finished, we could put it up on the website
and it would do the job of explaining all those things. We could
then add something about the music to fill things out.

Your biography states you have pursued a PhD, but it does not
state if the pursuit ended in success, failure or if it is still
ongoing.

Yes.

(I *did* warn you that these comments would get more and more
pedantic:-) I couldn't spot any other ambiguous statements in the
text of the website.

There's something wrong with ambiguity?

Finally, even though I like an uncluttered, minimalist look to
webpages, and I like what you did with CSS, some people may think
that a white background is "boring". You might be able to diffuse
this potential criticism yet retain a minimalist look by having a
pale-color background. Have a look at www.CiaranMcHale.com for an
example of what I'm talking about. I'm *not* suggesting you use
a horrible pale shade of brown like I did; pick something nicer.
(In my defence, I must point out that I am bisexual, which means I
can cook but I don't have any sense of color coordination.) If you
like the idea of using a pale-color background then you will have
to change the white background color of your top and bottom images
to match; I'm not sure how feasible that would be or how nice the
result would look.

This is something I've already considered. The borders are not
actually a problem, as they are PNG files with transparent
backgrounds (I was planning ahead when I created them).

I'm also considering splitting up the bottom one into three images
so I can make the text flow into the space between them and around
the neck of the viol that sticks up on the right. As of now, it's
implemented as a background for the footer DIV and thus has a hard
horizontal top margin that is at the top of the neck of the viol.
The original page design was set up with paragraphs formatted to
slide them down between the two "horns" of the image, but when we
reallocated the text onto multiple pages, we ended up with just the
nav and email address at the bottom, and it looks empty. This also
serves to push a very nice image down below the area that someone
might be tempted to look at.

But that's for a later revision.

By the way, I like the unintentional "Who farted?" looks on the
faces in the full-group photo. Just photoshop in a birthday cake
and it would be perfect.

Someone who saw the pictures remarked that the women are smiling and
the men are not. We were going for a somewhat whimsical look, but I
don't do whimsical myself, so I look very strange in all the
pictures. Heaven knows, the ones you see are selected from 38 raw
shots, and none was perfect. It's hard enough to get a good picture
of one person, let alone six!

Thanks again for your feedback -- it's very helpful.

--
David W. Fenton http://www.dfenton.com/
usenet at dfenton dot com http://www.dfenton.com/DFA/
.