Please Review My Site

[jazzmatazz2005]

I been working on site for a while and i want to hear all of THE GOOD, THE BAD and THE UGLY from my WPW peers.

Please keep in mind that i am new to all of this and i don't have any prior web development experience but, please don't be easy on me. I want to hear it all so i can make my site better.

Check it out at www.rocdamic.com

[JKomp]

Hmm, i'm sure i saw this site last year and the design was much better before. I thought you were going to develop into an online recording studio - i dont see that anywhere?

[annashon]

quick thought, tone down the backgrounds as I had a headache in the first minute. Some of the fonts are progressive but unreadable. Maybe I am getting to old for this view but you want the majority of the viewers to stay at the site.

[DrTandem1]

You're kidding, right?:

SITE REQUIREMENTS:

*HIGH SPEED INTERNET CONNECTION AND FLASH 5 PLUG-IN
*SCREEN RESOLUTION OF 1024x768

THIS SITE IS BEST VIEWED WITH INTERNET EXPLORER 6.x or GREATER

Why not just say, "Best viewed on my computer, using my browser from my house?"

Okay, let's "enter" the site. (I thought I did that when I first went to your URL.)

Too wide, too long, too large in file size.

What the heck is "Fressness?" Sorry, I guess I'm just not into gangsta rap. Don't get it, don't want to get it. If I want to listen to the radio, I turn on the radio. If I want to hear rap, I can go to the 'hood and it's blasting from the woofer of every ride and crib.

Harsh, I know, but you asked us not to go easy on you.

[mdmspt]

The site content is not, in general, my cup of tea. However, I do think that it probably does exactly what you want it to do, in terms of design. I looked only at the home page for two reasons:

1) I just really did not want to see more, but only because of my sensitivity to, shall we say, less refined types of communication and displays. That being said, it did seem inviting to your generally intended audience.
2) I'm afraid of catching a virus from sites like this--especially any music sites.

Several design comments/changes I would make:

1) Drop the splash page and get people to your home page on the first click.
2) It's too wide for my screen. I hate having to scroll horizontally in order to read the whole page.
3) The blue titles on the maroon (?) background do not work. They are impossible to read. I think the white font works fine with the red background. Although I usually do not like colored backgrounds, I think yours give the site the type of cache you are seeking.
4) That picture of the three people looking down at you: Because it's backlit, the faces are underexposed, so they are very difficult to see. That may be exactly what you want, though; somewhat threatening with criminal overtones.

Good luck, I guess.

[mgillis]

So, you've had some interesting and "personal" feedback here, which really isn't appropriate, so here's some feedback on the site itself.

You must have made some changes based on other comments since there aren't any neon blue titles anymore, but I'd ditch all the crazy blue from the site - it makes people's eyes go buggy, because that colour combination creates an optical illusion.

You need some colour to differentiate different text on the site. I'd do your "headlines" in bold black -the red is bright enough to handle it, and leave the rest of the text white.

When I left the home page, the site un-centered and shifted to Left Justification on my screen - make sure that your pages follow the same format, and the centering is better.

Ditch the splash page - you can inform the user about speeed requirements on your home page. Also, the splash page looks amateur and downgrades the rest of the site.

The radio stream is down, so I can't check that out, but basically if you are going to stream live, you'll have to limit to high-speed connections. However, let people know what the minimum connection speed is "High Speed" is a pretty wide range of connections.

Best of Luck!

[jazzmatazz2005]

Thanks for the feedback even though most of it seems personal.

[godzilla]

Two comments: color choice.. unless you really want to keep them choose colors that do not kill the eyes of the visitor. A goo exercise would be to give this site to a person little interested in its content and ask the person to find some information on it: the task should takea bout 5 minutes.Then ask what clolors bother the viewer. Repeate with at least5 not really experienced users.

Finally, there is a `division test`(as I call it) that you could perform. That is try to mentally draw lines delimiting each section on your page and assume that this lines go from one side of the page to another. If you are lost and you haven`t drawn even a half of the lines in your mind(or even on paper) then you should realine and restructure your website. Backgroud: in HCI(Human Computer Interactions) it is believed that all people best view information in tables or alligned similarly to them. The amount of sells though should be small and should as close as possible exhibit the futures of ordinary table. This way a user cna mentaly structure the website in a form of a table and be able to find things very quickly.

Comment: you may want to reduce the size of the front page or to restructure it differently. 1)Note that the first thing user looks at is at the midddle of the page. 2)A user may be tired of scrolling if the page is too long. 3)Human mind can`t handle more then five chunks of infoirmation at a time and you have more then this of screen fonts on the website. This means that when I scan the website I see only different fonts and not content.

I think that that`s it: if you have any questions or doughts about stats and references I have given here just write me and I will be glad to direct you to the sources.