| StoreTags: webdesign, webpage, website, hits
Author: jcd on September 18 2006 Viewed 4487 times. 4 people liked this blog. You can rate it below if you haven't already.
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My website sucks. Or maybe it's the music.
I spent two weeks making the slimmest, cleanest, most standards-compliant site that I know how to. I trimmed all the fat, kept it focused on music (to the exclusion of a blog, of photos, of random news stories), and began updating weekly with new tracks.
My traffic dropped to fucking zero.
I'm tempted to make a brash, stylish, slow-loading photoshop-based design to see if that reverses the trend.
my site is at link if you want to take a look. At this point I'm open to pretty much any suggestions, since my traffic literally cannot get any worse. | |
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09/18/06
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mulletballet
Well, I did web design about 10 years ago for an online shopping mall. For what that's worth, I'll tell you this:
Your website is boring - I didn't want to read past the first two or three lines, because nothing grabbed my attention.
Do something to give it some 'oomph' -- even one well placed graphic somewhere on the screen could make all the difference.. just make it interesting....
I mean... "Building on fire" -- that's a phrase that could be quite exciting and the graphical possibilities are almost limitless.
09/18/06
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room
i agree i'm afraid - the colour scheme, the style its all conservative and boring
it looks like a timbre merchants site - good luck stylising it into something more individula and dynamic that represents your music 
edited: Sep 18 2006
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mrpanda
Ditto. Looks like a website for selling carpet. You don't have to go all out on the graphics end to make your site more aesthetically pleasing. Like mulletballet said, one well placed graphic can make all the difference.
If it were me, i would start with the following. I'd change the font family from serif to sans-serif. I'd play around with some more exciting colors, not necessarily migraine inducing, but at least eye catching. After listening to a few of your tracks, i'd suggest using cold hues - blues, blacks, greys or if not that then something stark like white background and grey text. I would make the title text bigger, even if it requires using a translucent png/gif rather than jacking up the font size. Also, you have a whole bunch of what in art would be called negative space, which is a blank area taken up by nothing. Sometimes negative space can work to your advantage. For example, if you choose to have a minimalist design, you could make the layout look and feel more modern and stark with perhaps a few very simple graphics for punctuation. Lastly, the layout doesn't seem to reflect your music at all. It doesn't give the viewer a sense of what to expect and therefore, no real reason to continue reading or bother downloading.
With all that being said, you music really is quite good and so is your desire to keep things simple and fast. You just need a design that really reflects all that.
09/18/06
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kidko
you can be standards compliant and exciting!
09/18/06
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celibacyclub
i think making things a bit more encapsulated would help, like maybe having two colums, and some sort of lines between sections. i dont really like the light brown text.
09/18/06
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celibacyclub
my website sucks too.
09/18/06
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celibacyclub
i do like how the links become unbold after they are clicked.
edited: Sep 18 2006
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ignatius
i did these two sites myself adn the hardest thing for me was formating it so it looked decent and finding a decent colorscheme.
i have to change it all in the next month or so to add features and pages and all that shit. i'm not looking forward to it and may bite the bullet and get someone else to do it. i used html for total idiots to do them. really boring.
link
link
i agree w/the other comments here that your site is quite plain. you need to add some headers or graphics or something to make it look perty.
09/18/06
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flies
i like the design of the site a lot. plain is cool if the colors/proportions are right. Needs more content and a navigation bar, and some visual differentiation between the 'index' and the content pages.
09/18/06
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ignatius
flies said: "i like the design of the site a lot. plain is cool if the colors/proportions are right. Needs more content and a navigation bar, and some visual differentiation between the 'index' and the content pages."
ditto
09/18/06
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Matti
i like it! i like low-key.
it's funny, i read this just after submitting a blog of my own about web site design.
but i'm just beginning to get my head around it.
09/19/06
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rrooyyccee
hi
i like the simplicity, but can understand why you are not getting hits.
there is a certain cost and commitment to clicking onto a sound link. . . i.e. waiting a few minutes or seconds for the file to start up. i usually want some sign that there is a better than chance probability that i'll like the song. fonts, graphics, etc. are all clues about what the song will sound like. so i think a few visual clues about what to expect would help.
09/19/06
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tylth
the design is fine, looks like a sheet of paper
put some snuff on it?
mine is much worse. don't even know how many hits i get
09/19/06
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Adjective
i think it's not boring enough!
lose the fancy color
but if more zazzz is what you desire
make the background a faint watermark image of a old man crying
09/19/06
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hecanjog
dope clip at the top! love the rhodesish sound in the first part.
but yes, i'm sorry to say it looks a bit like that wordpress theme nobody except lawyers go for :/
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