Feedback on New Site!

[Matt Baker]

Hey,
Our new site is up and running. Any feedback you can give us would help us out.

http://www.brothersfdm.com

Thanx,
Matt Baker
Brothers from Different Mothers

[Happy Pig]

Certainly looks nice.

however with my 'puter set to 800*600 I couldn't read any of the text. I had to switch to full screen veiwing (and then it was difficult but possible to read) or leave for the text version.

[scot]

Site looks cool.

The video is huge!

[Steven Ragatz]

Beautiful design, though the pig is right - you have to have a big screen to see all of the content.

You might consider the order of your icons on the home page. Is "Mailing List" so important as to be first? I would think that you would have "The Brothers" and "Mailing List" switched.

Try to find some more pictures of you guys working on a stage. All of the shots in your gallery are of street or studio shots. You might also want to reconsider the order of the pics in the thumbnail window. The shots with the colored mural and the fire are more interesting to me than the shot of some juggler's butt or the two of you getting down the three rubber balls. Since getting still images is easy, there is no reason not to upgrade your embedded media to match the professionalism of your interface.

Can you Photoshop the clouds on your animated icons on the home page so it doesn't look like it's going to rain?

Your "Upcoming Events" .php page barfed on me. Upcoming events, or where-am-I-now pages are questionable in my opinion. They work only if you are very careful about maintaining them on a regular basis and do lots of gigs. If the information isn't both impressive and current, then you might consider changing it to a "Favorite Events", or a "Past Clients" sort of thing.

Also consider the fact that most computer screens (really, allfor any practical purposes) have a 4:3 aspect ratio. It looks as if your layout was done closer to 3:4. The current format would look good on a sheet of paper, but gets cropped when viewed on a computer ,plus there is lots of wasted real-estate on the sides. If you have control over the layout, I would redesign it so that to orient horizontally. After all, what's the advantage of having dynamic media in an embedded window if the user has to scroll the browser window up and down all the time anyway? If you're going to do that, abandon the Flash tech and do it with html pages.

I was not able to get back into the site after my initial viewing. Maybe a server thing.

25MB videos don't even get downloaded to my computer, and I have a high bandwidth connection. Have someone compress that sucker or stream it.

Very nice design and a sweet look. Did you do this yourselves or hire it out?

Steven Ragatz

[ 12-17-2002: Message edited by: Steven Ragatz ]</p>

[Brian R Wilson]

Great looking site brothers,
Here's some input.

The text is too small (as previously mentioned).. You could also make your entire site window bigger, That way you have more room for pics, text etc. You can even keep the design the same (as it's great) just make the lines go wider.

The video was HUGE, even some of the pics were a tad too big. Be mindful of how much time people are going to spend waiting to see a video/image. I spent a few minutes waiting (i have high speed cable access too) and then just bailed. Keep in mind that most people don't have high speed. With images, you can have them reduced so that they load up quicker online. As long as they look good on the screen that's all that matters.

Update.. Apparently I had it open in another window and it just came on. Great video, but I think you could have shaved a minute off of it.

Thats about it.

If anyone has any comments on my sites please email em over,
Cheers,
Bri

www.orbitalent.ca
www.cowguys.com

[Stretch]

I'm using netscape (fewer viruses) and can't get past the front page.
:&gt;(

Bill

[Stretch]

Switched to internet explorer and got it fine after being promted to load macromedia. Looks great. Thanks for posting it.

Bill

[Matt Baker]

We had a good friend do it for us. He was at Portland juggling festival doing all the Hackysack moves off of structures (renegade).
Thankyou for the feedback! Keep it coming though!

[Matt Baker]

The more feedback the better!!

[Steven Ragatz]

This is what I mean:

BFDM Home 4:3

and move the "mailing list" link into the "contact page".

If it were me, I would title the categories with the word "The" in each ("The Acts", "The Videos", "The Pictures", "The Contact", etc.) It has a sense of fun about it that I like.

Adopt a rule that there should never be a page with only text throughout the site. Make sure that there is some photo of you guys doing something on each page. Keep the text to a minimum and give me some eye candy. If all you have are the images in the photo gallery, then disperse them throughout the site. (I don't like reusing photos, so it would be better to simple get some more images to propagate in the pages.)

Steven Ragatz

PS. Oh yes, and move my quote to the home page.