Website Review & Thoughts

bstrawse, Welcome to Webmaster Forums. If you would, please help us out here by helping us review 3 other sites listed here.

Critique

• Blue, blue and bluer - You do like the color blue, eh? It looks like 5 different shades there. To me it works okay (although an offset color may help) but your links (blue on blue) don't work well. If you kept the links blue, then I would change the table they are in to #FFFFFF. I don't really like the hover color on the links either. It should be one of the colors in the mp3 bar like the orange maybe. I also don't think the grey add to favorites box is very attractive.
• Alt tags - your logo at the top needs to have alt tags.
• Organization - the site looks a little bit disorganized. For one, having a navbar on the right side is not usually good. In the case of your site, I think that it would help if the Navbar was at the top. Then I would decrease the table size and center it. I also don't like the A B C search by song or artist. It just looks a little tacky as it is. I would also separate the search into Song and/or Artist. This would help someone drill down their search quicker. Your email signup is hard to see up in the right corner.

Content wise the site is good. The searches seem to work okay but could be improved. I really think the things that should be improved on are layout and color scheme.

The impression I get with this site is that it seems to be rather hastily put together. It doesn't look like you really thought about what you're doing and more importantly why you're doing it. The logo text is okay, but it doesn't work well with the MP3 Search Center thing beside it. The blue is just very listless looking in this case.

Overall, you haven't captured the spirit of what your site is about. I think that a warmer colour scheme with reds and oranges would do a better job of representing your topic - the word vibe comes to mind... thinking about beats and melodies. Music is much more exciting than your site suggests.

One idea could be to take a favourite CD cover, scan it in and choose colours from there. Allow the design style of the liner notes to guide your web design. Hmm.... I might actually try that myself just as a design exercise... too bad my scanner is broken

I think it looks good. Just a couple comments...

You have a "what's new" box but the last update was April 7. Why bother if you haven't updated it in four months? Just makes it look stale.

In IE 4.0 (Mac) there is almost an entire screen's worth of blank space before the bottom of the page.

In NS 4.6 I don't see this gap, but the "advertising, contact us, etc." text at the bottom is the same color as the background, so virtually invisible until I did a "select all".

I am viewing the site on IE5.0.

Fist thing I would do is turn off the table border for the "What's New". Do some other type border.

You could change the color of the rollover text links to something that will stand out more. The disappear when you mouse over them.

The logo at the top has jagged edges. That would be easy to fix. Maybe change it's color to something brighter.

I liked your FAQS. I actually learned something.

Spelling error on the FAQS page at the very bottom.
-----3.(d) The song I downloaded recently sounds garbled and is cut short. Why? Unfortunately this is a reasonably common occurence ***I think it should be occurrence*** and is unavoidable.-----
Can't believe I caught that.

One other thing and it is just a thing with me... I hate "in your face pop-ups". Might consider moving the mailing list thing.

The site is blue, blue, blue, blue. Needs some color.

disastermaster

Hiya bstrawse,

I agree with everything that's been said so far. The site looks ok as it is but I think that the blues just make it feel a bit to cold. I liked Megan's idea of using reds & oranges, like the ones in the logo equalizer bit. This should also help give the site a unique identity as it just looks a bit thrown together right now.

This page makes me feel so cold that i want to start a bonfire in the trashcan from my cubicle! It's VERY blue. I was thinking maybe you could use some light greys or maybe an off white (like the color of your logo). Also, that grey box on the bottom sticks out like a sore thumb. kinda looks out of place. I would be very cautious about doing anything with MP3's because of the RIAA being on such a rampage. You need permission of the owners of the recordings to post any kind of MP3 on your website. Even alot of bands can't even post their own mp3's on their website because the record label owns the rights to the recordings (i speak from experience). Good luck.

PUNKK