HTML-only music website - opinions?

eviltimeban

Hi there, this is my first time posting on this particular forum and I am looking for some resources I can use for my website. Right now I've no access to any software to design the site so I had to rely on good ol' html coding.

The background is, its a music website to feature all the albums that I've recorded, with mp3 links. Ideally I'd like to have a music player as well as a "preview" part of it, but I'm not really sure how to do that.

So what does the html-only site look like? How's the navigation? Look and feel wise its pretty basic, black and white with text, but is it easy to get around? Is there too much on the home page?

The address is www.robertcrosbie.net

Cheers.

Liam Byrne

I'd widen the centre area; very, very few people are using 640x480 screens....in fact, you're 80% safe to even go for over 900 pixels, as most screens will be 1024 wide.

I'd increase the font size for more impact, and also used CSS-styled headers to break up the text a little.

I'd also move the navigation links to the top, because they almost get lost within the text. By all means have secondary text navigation at the bottom, but make a navigation bar at the top because otherwise it gives the impression of a one-page-only "site".

The layout of the albums pages could be improved, lessening white-space by putting the album covers side-by-side, with the title/caption underneath each.

Finally, the centre area widens on some pages, causing a small "jump".

The main point is that you have the basics, something lots of "flashier" sites don't....so you've gone about this the right way around; it's just a case of giving it a little more "wow" factor.

Best of luck with it.

EDIT : For the mp3 playback, try one of these - easy enough to set up.

http://www.flashmp3player.org/demo.html

http://musicplayer.sourceforge.net/

lil_lisa

Yeah Liam's right, make it wider, 800-900 should do fine. Although, you might be better working in percentages for some browsers, say width:70% and you don't have to specify the height. Also, I see there are some CSS classes in your code, but I can't see any CSS file, is there a reason for this? CSS can make everything so much more neater and easier to work with. Especially with multiple pages.

Maybe pop something like the following under your image:

<p align="center"><a href="albums.html">Albums</a>|<a class="test1" href="projects.html">Projects</a>|<a class="test1" href="compilations.html">Compilations</a></p>

And maybe align your _______ to the center too.

eviltimeban

Thanks for the tips, yeah I tried one of those Flash players before but found them limited as they were just players. I'd like to have something which would be: name of song, then a "play" button to stream the preview, then a "down arrow" button which would be the download link.

lil_lisa

Well, currently HTML5 has an <audio> tag which you could probably incorporate a link to your song onto.

But for now, you could try a grooveshark widget. Upload your music to grooveshark and place something from here on your site!

compaqlaptop1

dsf

eviltimeban

I've made some changes based on the comments, mostly around the navigation - I've added a bar on the top of the pages. Perhaps you could have a look and see if it works better. I've also changed the colours of the links so they stand out a little more. I still haven't figured out how to prevent the "jumps" in table width, I guess its because those pages are slightly wider. Damn my lack of web development software!

www.robertcrosbie.net

lil_lisa

What do you mean by jumps? I would recommend placing the top and bottom navigation bars on the home page too.

On the following line:

<table align="center" bgColor="white" border="0" cellPadding="5" cellSpacing="1" id="TABLE1" style="HEIGHT: 571px; WIDTH: 442px" width="75%">

remove the WIDTH:442px part and see how it looks. If the font stretches across it you can center it or left align it easily.

You should look into attaching a CSS file, it's not that difficult to do. Instead of changing code for a table or background in every page individually, you would only have to change it once.

...Oh but it looks good