I've been working on creating http://www.darktronica.com for a couple of months now and would love to get critiques on overall design, browser compatibility, security, navigability, etc.

Its purpose is to serve as an encyclopedia/review site for gothic-industrial type bands; as such, my goal was for a fairly simple, utilitarian layout that's functional but not flashy. I know some people's first impression is going to be "omg greyscale" on the color scheme, but I'm ok with that for now; it fits the theme of the musical genres on the site and for now I wanted to focus on function over fashion.

Content is still light, as the Genres section is incomplete and most bands aren't fully reviewed. But I'm interested in any technical feedback.

Also, even if you don't know much about these kinds of bands, pass the word on to any friends of yours who do--from a content perspective, I'd be interested to hear from musically knowledgeable people about the appeal of some of the full reviews, and what other features would be desirable that I could work on developing.

If anyone sees any dire security lapses, it would be great if you could keep comments on those to PM's until I can shore them up. Hopefully there won't be much, since there are currently no forms on the user portion of the site except for standard WordPress commenting on the blog section, and there isn't too much exposed through the php parameter passing in urls.

Thanks!

8/14/2007 4:49:15 AM

I don't know goth style but I'd expect to see some color.

Seems odd going straight to "Bands" page with no text really filling right side. I'd start on the "news" page or add an intro to the site. News page flows the best it seems more "fun" while your current index page is kinda boring.

8/14/2007 5:39:51 AM

F-



I KEED, I KEED

8/14/2007 8:36:34 AM

i like it. though the top navigation seems a little bubbly for the genre

8/14/2007 9:17:17 AM

the top nav "flashes" on rollover, you might want to try a different rollover script.

other than that it looks pretty good all things considered. easy to get around, pretty clean layout.

8/14/2007 9:18:32 AM

Quote :

"add an intro to the site."

worst. idea. ever.

Just my own preference, but I hate having to skip an intro to a website.

8/14/2007 9:22:22 AM

expanding on what cornbread said, it was not immediately obvious to me that the start page was also the Band Index page. The small letter-links on the left did not grab my attention enough to know that I was supposed to click them, nor was it immediately obvious what would happen if I click them (would get a list of bands starting with that letter).

furthermore, I would explore more ways to peruse the band list. A list where you see one letter at a time is a really poor way to scan large amounts of data. Even if you list the bands in text down the left column, I would like to see a bigger table in the main frame showing more information about each band in the list. Just like 1 cell for each band with a thumbnail of their band photo, some brief information (dates, latest album, 3 sentence description) and a link to the full page of each band.

In short - i really hate looking at lists of names that mean nothing to me, forcing me to click each name just to get the least bit of information about them.

Also - when you have pulled up a band, then you click a navigation link on the left side and a list shows up in the left column, the previous bands' information is still in the main frame. It would, again, be better for consistency if the main frame was replaced by the list of bands when you click a navigation link.

It looks like the Genres pages will eventually list all the bands that are in each genre?

For the Discography, can you link to places to buy the CDs or tracks?

8/14/2007 9:29:01 AM

that site makes me want to kill myself, so it's probably doing what it was designed to do

A+

8/14/2007 12:53:40 PM

http://www.darktronica.com/index.php?band=175&letter=T


some of the test isnt aligning with the graphics in FF2.0

8/14/2007 1:18:29 PM

to fix ^ change the .albumtitle background to #292829, and that seems to fix it. I think it only happens when the albumyear div is blank, so there's probably some kind of height or alignment element that should be fixed instead of just changing the background color

8/14/2007 1:48:44 PM

Quote :

"the top nav "flashes" on rollover, you might want to try a different rollover script. "

What exactly do you mean by "flashes"? It's actually not done by scripting at all, but rather the "regular" and "highlighted" part of each navbutton is part of the same image, and there's a :hover in the css page that changes the position of the image being displayed so that the highlighted version is shown when you hover over it. I thought it would be a better way to do it than the standard way using javascript, since that means it has to load a separate image on the first hover and some people might have scripting disabled. Anyway, I might not understand what you're meaning.

Quote :

"expanding on what cornbread said, it was not immediately obvious to me that the start page was also the Band Index page. The small letter-links on the left did not grab my attention enough to know that I was supposed to click them, nor was it immediately obvious what would happen if I click them (would get a list of bands starting with that letter). furthermore, I would explore more ways to peruse the band list. A list where you see one letter at a time is a really poor way to scan large amounts of data. Even if you list the bands in text down the left column, I would like to see a bigger table in the main frame showing more information about each band in the list. Just like 1 cell for each band with a thumbnail of their band photo, some brief information (dates, latest album, 3 sentence description) and a link to the full page of each band. "

Yeah, the initial front page right now is pretty hastily thrown together and needs a rewrite. At the very least it should direct people to the letter-links on the left, or explain what they are. No way am I going to do the retarded flash splash page, but there definitely should be more content on the front page to explain what the site is all about. Good advice.

I struggled with how to handle the navigation, and I don't particularly love the one letter per long list of bands solution myself. Thanks for the idea about having an actual thumbnail type page for each letter in the main content pane; that might help. As somewhat of an encyclopedic site, I figured the lettered index would make sense, and if someone finds a couple of bands they were looking for and like on the site, then they might just start clicking random bands with interesting names to see what they're about, but your thumbnail idea is more inviting and a better way to "suck people in."

Quote :

"It looks like the Genres pages will eventually list all the bands that are in each genre? For the Discography, can you link to places to buy the CDs or tracks?"

For Genres, I'm going to write a description and history of each genre, have the database spit out any of my "top 10" ranked albums that fall into that genre, and make a list of the bands in it. I could just rip the descriptions from wikipedia for now to have something there, but I didn't want to half-ass it. It's still a work in progress right now.

Links to Amazon or iTunes in the discographies are something I'm working on as part of a "phase 2" of the site design; that's about the only thing that's going to possibly make some money on the site in the long run (I have a feeling google ads for "goth ring tones" aren't exactly going to rake in the bucks). I'm checking out their affiliate programs to see if it's something that would be easily integrated into my database.



Thoughts about the google ads in general? I hate pages where they're obnoxiously placed and skinned, so I was hesitant to do that at all.

Quote :

"http://www.darktronica.com/index.php?band=175&letter=T some of the test isnt aligning with the graphics in FF2.0"

Good find, thanks.




For those who do this kind of thing for a living--is there really any point to wanting the css and code to validate to standards? I don't think there's any way mine would without losing the consistent appearance on all browsers, since IE6 and others have so many rendering quirks.

8/14/2007 5:10:46 PM

The only issues I have:


Text is too big in rollover images.

Body text is too big.

Link color needs to be different in order to keep the theme of the website.









mostly my issues are text-related. I think it's too big, and I'm looking at it in 1600x1200. I can't imagine it in 1024x768.

I know that goes contrary to what most people believe, but to me text on websites is like anorexic bitches - the smaller, the sexier

[Edited on August 14, 2007 at 8:25 PM. Reason : .]

8/14/2007 8:25:06 PM

Text is too small and it's missing the talking free iPhone flash advertisement.

8/14/2007 8:53:55 PM

OK, so I took some of the advice about navigation and threw together a quick navigation page for whenever someone clicks one of the menu letters, to see a quick thumbnail view of each band.

What do you think of something like this?

http://www.darktronica.com/index.php?letter=B

Graphically, I'll probably do something like rounding off the corners of the thumbnails, and maybe add a drop shadow or something silly like that, but I think it's improvement on the actual navigation, and presents some more quick-sketch information that might encourage people to just browse a bit more than if all they saw was the list of names on the sidebar.

8/16/2007 1:18:22 AM

those nav buttons are hideous and useless

8/16/2007 1:33:19 AM