Planetarion Forums - Silent Sky Media

relik · 23 Apr 2004, 04:18

Hey guys, I'm looking for some feedback on my music site at http://silentsky.tk - I just got the new layout up not long ago and I've been playing with some things. Check it out and tell me what you think lol. And if you play in a band, feel free to e-mail me about promotion, CD reviews, etc.

Sandsnake · 23 Apr 2004, 04:54

-On the homepage, consider spending a little time at the top telling us what you exist for. What is your site about? Is it a local band site, a major band site? Do they sign up or do you just review them? Give your users some purpose to your site and they'll stick around.

-Consider another color than Pink. Try to avoid overly bright colors, they tend to be hard to look at.

-If there's no information on the other side of a link,, comment it out. Empty pages suck.

-Also, no eye path. Where do you want your users to look first? it's a bit confusing. Consider moving the right side stuff to the left and placing the email capture above the info with a quick reason on why they should sign up.

-I'd recommend taking a look at Don't make me think by Steve Krug..it rocks a bit for usability stuff and covers a bit of design theory too.

-Don't waste your title with "Silent Sky Media"...it's probably the most important element on your page, search engine-wise...Make it something descriptive and use keywords relevant to what you're trying to communicate.

-Keep fillable fields white. They'll stick out more.

That's a quick, bulleted type feedback. I'm assuming your site is largely dictated by a CMS so you don't have much control over how it's coded. Otherwise, use CSS to do your layouts. TEENY bit of code and an external style sheet looks good, loads fast, and is much easier to edit.

Sandsnake · 23 Apr 2004, 05:01

You also have a very odd mix of inline styles (why not just define a class?) and old, depracated text attribute tags. Is that the CMS again?

Also, no doctype at the beginning. This is actually pretty important if you want it to work in all browsers. I'm going to assume you're using HTML 4.01 transitional, so before the opening <HTML> tag needs to be the following:

Code:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

Obliterate · 23 Apr 2004, 07:40

The pink colour theme put me off as soon as I opened the page I'm afraid :/

insane_in_da_membrane · 23 Apr 2004, 08:11

The pink is too bright.

JammyJim · 23 Apr 2004, 13:35

Text is too small and the pink is 'garish'

you might want to table the entire thing and slap it all in the centre. always looks better.

Sandsnake · 23 Apr 2004, 15:30

nah, no centered table. wrap it in a div tag, id it something like "frame" then in the css:

#frame {
margin: 0 auto;
}

saves lots of extra code

Leshy · 23 Apr 2004, 15:38

As others said, the pink/black is way too high contrast to make reading easy, especially if you're using a small font size.
Don't use tables for layout
Give links hover effects, it's hard to tell what is a link and what isn't.
Work on the design, it's a bit bland. Basically a long list of white text on a black background; it's not particularly inviting to read through.
Run your site through http://validator.w3.org.

relik · 23 Apr 2004, 20:19

Thanks a lot, this is the most relevant feedback I've gotten so far. As far as the colors, what would any of you suggest? I basically built the design based on the image because i liked how it looked, but a few others have commented on the color scheme being too hard on the eyes. I've considered moving the left tables to the right before, I'm not able to decide which looks better. As far as the news script, I have control over that to some extent with templates, so feel free to comment on the format of those too if there's something that you think doesn't look right.