I’ve written my first Web site (for my band). I’m sure it ain’t nuthin’ great, but it works. Experienced web designers, if you have nothing better to do, could you zip over there and tell me what I’ve done that violates all the principles of good Web-site design? Feel free to send email (from the Contacts page, of course) or post here.
Thanks.
You’ve kept it simple. It’s nice. I like it.
Besides some links that don’t work (mp3 links specifically), I think it serves it’s purpose quite well.
You may want to switch to a database driven system to make updates easier, but that’s entirely optional, and it might not be worth it, you’d have to decide that.
Looks good, congrats 
Off the top of my head the first things I would go about polishing are:
It’s looking great, especially for a first-timer, keep up the good work and remember, a website is almost always “under construction” 
Validate it. See http://validator.w3.org/
Thank everybody! I’ll give some of this stuff a try ASAP (in the spare time I have left after a full-time job, 6 kids, the band and learning Chinese).
Won’t this make the site unusable for folk with slow connections? I have been, of course, mostly concerned with just making the darned thing work rather than graphics quality, but I had decided that 400-500 pixels square was about the biggest I wanted to have on the site. Is that a bad decision?
You could put a smaller pic on the front page, and link it to a larger version of people click on it.
Very good for a first effort. As already mentioned, you should pre-load the mouseovers.
This is really subjective, but I don’t like the grungy page title and mouseover-tab graphics. I know you’re trying to get “dirty raw rock and roll”, but to me it looks yucky. I do like the vertical smear lines on the background though.
On the pictures, including the main one on the front page, I would zoom in to include more face and less background.
If I may ask, why doesn’t the song list include more originals? It kinda surprised me to see 4 CDs, and mostly covers on the list.
Wrote this yesterday.
Site went down.
Fortunately I saved it (there’s a shocker!)
You’ve gone for a fixed width of 750 pixels, left aligned.
I’m wondering why you wouldn’t go for % designed table at (say) 90 or 100%?
You have a lot of real estate over there on the right that is not being used.
Makes it looks a little ‘lopsided’.
Also, I would suggest you place your styles into a .css file (external style sheet) and link it in. That way if you do want to change a style you only have to change the one stylesheet rather than change the style on each page.
IMHO, the red unvisited links are out of character with the rest of the site which is essentially grey and black. Rethink the unvisited link color.
I’d probably also dump the table / cell heights. They’ll be essentially ignored anyway.
I used to use a double space after a full stop. Now I don’t. I prefer a single space after a full stop and think the additional looks ugly (in the HTML). As you’re using a WYSIWYG (presumably) editor, this probably won’t make a hoot of difference to you, but if you do decide to edit in HTML, remember that HTML is not white space aware and that a double space between words will only ever appear as a single space.
I can’t get home at the top of the page. There is a home link at the bottom, but I would like one at the top too.
As your pages grow longer and longer, you may also want a #top bookmark / link so those who are completely mouse dependent will love you too.
You have no height and width tags on your header / banner images. On a fast connection nobody notices that the page gets ‘shoved down’ only after the image has loaded, but on a dial up is it disconcerting. Put a height and width attribute on your banner images.
Ditto with the side nav images on the CD’s page. Pushes everything around until the images load. Use a preloader script for those too if you can.
There you go.
Nothing too bad, just a few tweaks and everything jells together a little better.
Thanks for asking! A lot of the originals are not party tunes, and the places we play are either bars or parties, where they want it loud and rowdy. So we play the up-tempo originals and then do a bunch of copy stuff that we find fun.
I agree about the empty space. If I knew how to do that percent thang, I would. I’ll have to search the help in my editor and see if that’s supported. I’ll look into the size tags for the menus and banners, too.
Once again, thanks everyone! I love this board!
I’m not a web design expert by any means, but I wanted to check in as a Mac user and tell you that nothing horribly wonky or funky jumps out at me while viewing your site on OS X, Safari browser. (Making sure your site looks good on multiple browsers and platforms is a good thing, as I’m sure you know!) So, from the Mac standpoint, thumbs up.
Oh, another thing, on this page (http://pwbb.home.comcast.net/midnightmove.html) the back cover of the album takes a long time to load (and I have broadband). Looking at the graphic by itself, I see that it is a lot larger than it appears on the page. You should resize this graphic and get it to a smaller file size. There’s no need for it to be so big.
Do you use Photoshop for your graphics (or Elements?). It has a “save for web” feature that really helps keep the file sizes of your photos down. I don’t know if Paint Shop Pro has anything similar, if you happen to use that. I would hope that it would.
I was hoping someone would do this! I downloaded Netscape to be able to check at least 2 browsers, but that’s my limit. Any Unix folks using “other” browsers?
Good to know there’s nothing “wonky or funky” on the site. Thanks, Yose!
Tools? You think I have tools for this stuff? I’m a guitar player for freak’s sake! I use MS Paint to cut the pics down to size–which I have now done. Triple thanks for noticing, there were 3 pics over 400K, while all the others are 40 and below (except one B&W which is 82K, I wonder why). Sheesh!
On that same note, is there any way I can check what it will look like for someone on a slower connection? I don’t even own a dial-up modem any more.