Website critique please
- Thread starter UberTiger
- Start date
You've got two of my most hated things on websites:
1) Music starts playing without me doing anything - You might like it but not everyone will, I don't. I appreciate it's the guys business though.
2) Your URL's don't change. To keep the music playing while you navigate the site the main content loads via AJAX.
So just buy wanting your music to start playing, and not get interrupted, you're first of all forcing me to listen to it and then not let me link to the information I want to keep.
For example:
"Hey UberTiger, check out this guys blog post on this really interesting topic! Oh wait, I can't link you it directly. Why not just go here http://sbserv.info/dev/rob/ - then click on Blog and scroll all the way down the page to Post1"
EDIT:: Reading this back I forgot to mention the positives!
Everything else! Think it looks pretty slick actually. Nice use of hover effects on everything and the photos work really well. Looks like there will be a sensible breakdown of content which should make it easy for people to find the information they're after.
Of course it would be easier if Google was able to link to the specific page that had the content they were looking for
P.S. He actually has some good music in the playlist I just didn't like the first song that came on the first time I viewed the page.
1) Music starts playing without me doing anything - You might like it but not everyone will, I don't. I appreciate it's the guys business though.
2) Your URL's don't change. To keep the music playing while you navigate the site the main content loads via AJAX.
So just buy wanting your music to start playing, and not get interrupted, you're first of all forcing me to listen to it and then not let me link to the information I want to keep.
For example:
"Hey UberTiger, check out this guys blog post on this really interesting topic! Oh wait, I can't link you it directly. Why not just go here http://sbserv.info/dev/rob/ - then click on Blog and scroll all the way down the page to Post1"
EDIT:: Reading this back I forgot to mention the positives!
Everything else! Think it looks pretty slick actually. Nice use of hover effects on everything and the photos work really well. Looks like there will be a sensible breakdown of content which should make it easy for people to find the information they're after.
Of course it would be easier if Google was able to link to the specific page that had the content they were looking for
P.S. He actually has some good music in the playlist I just didn't like the first song that came on the first time I viewed the page.
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Soldato
- Joined
- 18 Oct 2002
- Posts
- 16,084
- Location
- The land of milk & beans
A pretty good design mutilated by the two biggest annoyances in web development.
1) Ditch the music on autoplay it is very annoying. If I want to listen to his music I'll click on it. If you want to make it obvious that you can, have a call to action in the sidebar, or even an audio widget there. DO NOT AUTOPLAY IT.
2) Get rid of the frames. Obviously you've only done it this way to accomodate playing music throughout the site - so kill #1 and get #2 for free. Also, having the frame will not be helping your SEO at all.
1) Ditch the music on autoplay it is very annoying. If I want to listen to his music I'll click on it. If you want to make it obvious that you can, have a call to action in the sidebar, or even an audio widget there. DO NOT AUTOPLAY IT.
2) Get rid of the frames. Obviously you've only done it this way to accomodate playing music throughout the site - so kill #1 and get #2 for free. Also, having the frame will not be helping your SEO at all.
Thanks for the replies guys.
Point 1 from both of you - yep, I personally agree that generally music playing from page load isn't a good thing. But they site owner wanted it that way due to the musical nature of the site, he also wanted it to be randomised on load. I can see that's a particularly bad idea now due to the diverse mix of the type of music he plays, being greeted with one of the Doom tracks could be a nasty surprise to an unsuspecting visitor, however I don't think it would be as bad if one of his more chilled piano tracks greets the user.
There were two reasons behind using this particular player, one is the discreet nature of it at the bottom of the screen. So if it were to set to be off by default I'd probably need to have some kind of call to action on the page showing the user where it is and invite them to play it, which isn't a big deal.
But the other important reason was the factor is that it continues playing no matter where the user is on the site, so they can navigate and listen uninterrupted. It's the SCM player code that generates the frames to create this effect, which isn't ideal and leads onto the url issue..hmm. This could be side stepped by using a sharing widget perhaps on each page? Which would leave me with the SEO issue.
Roy - are you saying that I might be able to get around the continuous playing during navigation by using AJAX?
Point 1 from both of you - yep, I personally agree that generally music playing from page load isn't a good thing. But they site owner wanted it that way due to the musical nature of the site, he also wanted it to be randomised on load. I can see that's a particularly bad idea now due to the diverse mix of the type of music he plays, being greeted with one of the Doom tracks could be a nasty surprise to an unsuspecting visitor, however I don't think it would be as bad if one of his more chilled piano tracks greets the user.
There were two reasons behind using this particular player, one is the discreet nature of it at the bottom of the screen. So if it were to set to be off by default I'd probably need to have some kind of call to action on the page showing the user where it is and invite them to play it, which isn't a big deal.
But the other important reason was the factor is that it continues playing no matter where the user is on the site, so they can navigate and listen uninterrupted. It's the SCM player code that generates the frames to create this effect, which isn't ideal and leads onto the url issue..hmm. This could be side stepped by using a sharing widget perhaps on each page? Which would leave me with the SEO issue.
Roy - are you saying that I might be able to get around the continuous playing during navigation by using AJAX?
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Really like the design and agree with the music on load, but if the clients happy what else can you do?
My only question - I looked in the source code and couldn't see any method that you have used to embed the font into the site (or am I just missing it) - not everyone has Gill Sans on their computer
My only question - I looked in the source code and couldn't see any method that you have used to embed the font into the site (or am I just missing it) - not everyone has Gill Sans on their computer
I was just saying "AJAX" as to me it didn't look like a straight forward iframes implementation.
The fact you say the SCM player is doing some jiggery pokery is probably what I was seeing.
Technically there are some methods out there (jquery lets you do this pretty easily iirc) that let you update the URL in the address bar like in the case of using hashbang tags etc.
I'm not sure how well search engines handle it though.
To add more food for thought look at this Google result for The Lowry:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?aq=f&gcx=c&ix=c1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=the+lowry
See how you get direct access to "contact us" and other useful pages that Google has found. This is the kind of useful contextual links that power users expect to see and I'm not sure this kind of implementation will support.
The fact you say the SCM player is doing some jiggery pokery is probably what I was seeing.
Technically there are some methods out there (jquery lets you do this pretty easily iirc) that let you update the URL in the address bar like in the case of using hashbang tags etc.
I'm not sure how well search engines handle it though.
To add more food for thought look at this Google result for The Lowry:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?aq=f&gcx=c&ix=c1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=the+lowry
See how you get direct access to "contact us" and other useful pages that Google has found. This is the kind of useful contextual links that power users expect to see and I'm not sure this kind of implementation will support.
Thanks for telling me, it's on my friends VPS and it's been slow a lot recently and I'm told it's to do with the Apache config or or something, I don't know much about servers. I'm just going to move it all over to my new shared hosting package tonight because it's a huge pain and very frustrating.
Ahh yes, I'll have a look into that. Can that also be generated by creating a specific site map page and submitting it to the search engines too?
The font stack I've used is as follows:
font-family:"Gill Sans", "Gill Sans MT", GillSans, Calibri, "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;
As suggested by this site
They say it's a safe stack to use "The Gill Sans stack should work on most all computers. Gill Sans comes on all Macs and Gill Sans MT is installed with Microsoft Office, and Calibri (which is a good stand-in for Gill Sans) is one the core Vista fonts and is installed with both Office Windows and Office Mac. And lastly, if all else fails, use Trebuchet."
So hopefully it'll be alright
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[...] The font stack I've used is as follows:
font-family:"Gill Sans", "Gill Sans MT", GillSans, Calibri, "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;
As suggested by this site
They say it's a safe stack to use "The Gill Sans stack should work on most all computers. Gill Sans comes on all Macs and Gill Sans MT is installed with Microsoft Office, and Calibri (which is a good stand-in for Gill Sans) is one the core Vista fonts and is installed with both Office Windows and Office Mac. And lastly, if all else fails, use Trebuchet."
So hopefully it'll be alright
Sorry
EDIT: That's Firefox on WinXP, no MS Office installed, and 19 variations of Opentype Gill Sans in the fonts folder [hey, I'm a graphic designer, I need them!]. So this is in all likelihood the only time you'll ever see this wrong-render. It's also not specific to your site, obviously.
If anything it's a useful reminder that when it comes to web design, no matter what you do, you can't account for all scenarios.
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Soldato
- Joined
- 18 Oct 2002
- Posts
- 16,084
- Location
- The land of milk & beans
Doing that will help, but it is by no means a guarantee. The insite links tend to only appear when you have a high volume of traffic searching for you in google. There is no way to request the links, or to tell google what links you'd like in there.
To be honest, when I visit a site and it starts playing music it puts me right off. Your title tag just stats "Rob Upton" use a description tag as well and put a bit more otherwise you will fail when it comes to search engine traffic