General Music Chat

Needed your opinion. Just have ideas in place for pictures and links. www.lostcausetheband.com Any advise? If it makes you laugh or you think it sucks, (Screw you) I'm on this site as a musician not a website builder.

Pretty basic but it gets the point across! hahaha...

If you ever need help on this sort of thing, let me know. I am a degree holding graphic designer. Always give great deals to musicians! (Mostly because I know first hand how broke we all are.. lol)

here's my site... feel free to pick my brain if you want. I'm always able to help.

www.powergrooveindustries.com

I thought it was cool until I clicked the enter-site and the little player only played a short segment over and over , then I didnt know what to do. I guess I could have clicked your myspace link, but expecting a lil more?

Not bad, man. Definitely seen way worse.
The content is good, but the arrangement is not appealing.
The flash intro was great. No, really. Now the site itself.. well, here we go:

1. Have a dark-ish background. Gradient color is better, as it's easier to look at for a long time without causing eye irritation [fact].
2. Have your 5 links set across the top of your page with a decent layout.
3. The clip. Well, it sounds good, but it's sudden, short and repetitive. Not good:

(i)Have a fade in and fade out on the clip. You don't want the music to slam your visitors in the ear like that.
(ii)Make the clip longer if you can. If not, then let it play once and only once.

4. Have a little bio: how/when/where you met, style, experience, regular venues, etc.
5. "Band Member" [which is missing an S] should include a pic of each musicians separately with his name on it. Gets em more familiar with who's who.


That's just some basic stuff. Hope it helps. If not, then I just wasted 6 minutes and you suck

I checked out your site, I went as a individual person checking out some bands, not as the musician that I am. Here's my feed back for you, The introduction to your website was cool, I really like it. yet at the same time I wasn't impressed when I went inside. Let me try to give you an analagy if I can. It's like you attend a concert, let's say it's a country and western band. You get there and the stage is set, all the instruments are ready to go. You have the drums, the guitars, keyboards, bass, and violins. The band members come out and take their places. Yet when the music starts, all you get is some dude singing with an accompament tape. And you're like 'What happen?'
I say all of this with respect to you and your group. You don't have to be a master at building websites to do this. Just be sure your introduction matches the rest of the website, suggestion. Don't have alot of links to other places, and don't try to fix it overnight. Take the time and do a layout on paper. I know you can do this.
As a musicain I'd say, hey if it works for you go for it, yet I believe what you'll benefit more from my first opinion.

I've seen worse - but not by much.

(1) The music has already been mentioned, I won't beat a dead horse. Unless you've got some way to handle the streams in a user-controlled manner (a la MySpace) don't use it. I wouldn't even put music up; I'd just point people to your MySpace page if they want a sample. Besides, MySpace is free. Let them deal with the cost of your music bandwidth. Keep your site simple, clean and fast.

(2) Flash intros - I don't know why people do this. In the web design industry, this is pretty much universally accepted as a no-no. Yet for some reason "artistic" web sites (musicians and movies being the two big culprits) violate this rule all the time. Intro pages suck! They prevent your users from getting to the content quickly! And slow intro pages only cause people to turn their browsers away and find information from another source. Ditch it.

(3) Layout and Colors mean everything. You want it to look "professional" even if you aren't. Get someone to design the site for you if you don't have a knack for design. Find someone who will cut you a deal, or do it for free (provided you've see their work ahead of time and like it).

I am not a good graphics designer, so I let other people do it for me. I am, however, a professional software developer, so I can put the technology together.

Our band's website: http://www.dayofrain.net

The logo was done by our drummer, who actually HAS graphic talent, unlike me. The page layout was provided by a Wordpress template; I just manipulated the CSS to get it exactly the way I wanted it. Wordpress handles everything else.

The tools exist to build a good looking website for free and with minimal effort - stand on the shoulders of those who have come before you!

Best advice I've heard all day, CF.

Thanks to ALL for the help. I took the advice and did some changes. I like the ideas and will keep tring to in prove it. I expected to get blasted but Thanks for the Positive criticism. Heres the updated site www.lostcausetheband.com

Hmm, I was gonna say "much better" but then I saw no player on the myspace link and when I hit "music" I got the following message from myspace: (?) :
______________________________________

The link you are trying to visit has been disabled.

You have reached a link that is no longer in service. That means the link was very naughty, and, much like head lice, had to be eliminated before it spread.

You may be asking yourself, 'Hey, what was it about that link that got it in trouble?' An excellent question! Usually, it's one of the following reasons:

- The link was spam! No one likes spammers, and we don't like their links.

- You almost got phished! There are people out there who want to steal your MySpace password. They want to log in as you and send spam, harass your friends, change your profile, and generally run amok. Phishing pages are usually designed to look like MySpace to trick you. Other sites may also ask for your MySpace login information to customize your profile, insert videos or slide shows, track visitors, or any number of other things.Don't make it easy for them. ONLY USE YOUR MYSPACE LOGIN INFO ON WWW.MYSPACE.COM!!

- Viruses are not fun! Neither is adware, spyware, or malware. We cut the links to places that are known sources of infection.

If you really did want to check out some spam, viruses, or phishing pages, we're really sorry to have interrupted. We're sure you can find it elsewhere. There's plenty on the Internet

LOL!!!!

FIXED Going to get some good pics up. Thanks for the help