www.ronkymac.com - music website for review.

[ronkymac]

www.ronkymac.com

Hello all,

I'm needing help with a couple of issues with my website, as well as some general constructive criticism regarding anything such as colours; ease of use; intuitivity; speed; accessibility etc etc.

The site is a personal one: basically a sort of portfolio for the work I do here and there.

My main worry is that the tool I wrote to use on the website uses flash to stream music from a remote server. I have come across some computers here and there that do not have flash installed, therefore leaving a blank space. What I'm thinking is whether or not to ignore these users who do not have flash and instead just focus on keeping the site clean and up to date...? Put it like this, if you're a musician, then the chances are that you will have a pretty decent computer due to the fact that so much music [at least, of some select genres] depends on bleeding edge hardware and software. Not that I would consider flash bleeding edge!! The last thing I'd want, though, is a site that has one of those darn things at the bottom 'Best viewed with....' and what have you.

Colour wise, the site's been given a huge uplift quite recently. The old site was a cacophony of greys and blacks which was just rather depressing to say the least. I'm still not quite sure about the colours though - I never seemed to have much of an eye for creating attractive frontend.

For tech heads among you, the site uses just PHP and a bit of javascript here and there. I had considered using MySQL to store blobs of data here and there, but found the whole thing a bit gimmiky. I'll give it to you, there's not as much flexibility with outputting of data, but I guess the backend is fine for the moment.

Site optimisation has always been a bit of a problem for me... I've ended up having to submit the XML directory structure of the website to Google. Site never seems to be indexed properly. It may be beyond the scope of 'submit your site for review' - but do you think it may have anything to do with the way the root (ie ://www.ronkymac.com/) is structured...?

Regards.

[nullvariable]

Hey ronkymac,
One of the first things I noticed off the bat was a couple of bad/goofy links. Your code is clean, only minor issues when vaildated.

Speed wise the site loads pretty quick and only shows a 12 second load on a 56k modem. You may want to see if you can slim down the size of your images without losing quality.

Design wise a little color or a unique logo design would add a lot.

Also consider rephrasing this:

No part of this website, or any of its content, may be copied or downloaded, except if specified or prior permission is obtained.

Unfortunately when I visit your page I download it ;)

[ronkymac]

Hey ronkymac,
One of the first things I noticed off the bat was a couple of bad/goofy links. Your code is clean, only minor issues when vaildated.

hmmm, well it's still a site which is being redone. The last site was horrendous, so bad links are being sorted after I have all the data in the right places.

Speed wise the site loads pretty quick and only shows a 12 second load on a 56k modem. You may want to see if you can slim down the size of your images without losing quality.

Will do.

Design wise a little color or a unique logo design would add a lot.

Never been good at logos - could you reccomend any strategies? or even what I should be focussing on, from your point of view?

Also consider rephrasing this:

No part of this website, or any of its content, may be copied or downloaded, except if specified or prior permission is obtained.

Unfortunately when I visit your page I download it ;)

Visiting a site is not generally regarded as actively downloading content...

Regards.

[nullvariable]

Glad I could help.

In regards to your comment:

Visiting a site is not generally regarded as actively downloading content...

You're right, its not perceived that way but in the most technical sense the site is being downloaded, which doesn't mean anything except that your request for people to not hijack your site can be dismissed. :-) It's just me but I would try to clarify that a bit.

As for a logo, you can find tons of places that will design one for you for anywhere from $25 to $1000. If you don't feel that your logo ideas are good or if you can't create what you can visualize you might consider that as an option. Another option, if you have enough visitors, is to have a contest and offer a prize for the best design. Generally this only works well on sites with good traffic and that cater to people who tend to have design experience but if you offer $25 as a prize you'll certainly see some interesting results :) Or find a college student, friend or someone who would take a mention of him/herself on your website as enough to do the logo for free. Of course there's not really anything wrong with the site as is, just a thought to add some color :)

[DougN]

I'm not a programmer or site designer but I can give you some observation. First I have to scroll to see all the page. Next its not completely clear what your site is about or the purpose of it.

As far as optimizing the site for search engines, you need to target a primary keyword phrase for each page. That phrase needs to be in the meta description, in the page title, in the headline, in the first sentence of the body copy, and repeated moderately throughout the copy.

As I learned myself a long time ago in life, people are not interested in me, but only what I can do for them. Same thing online. People want to know what is in it for them when they visit a site. So you have to make it clear in really short order why that visitor should stay and view your pages. Its all about the visitor. Put him/her first and you will be on the right track.

Hope this was helpful.

Doug