SITE REVIEW: jonnelson.aerocore.net

I'm currently in the process of redesigning my website. The format you will see is currently unreleased, which is why it is stored in a folder on the site.

http://jonnelson.aerocore.net/new/

My site shows most of my digital media works I've created in terms of music for games, personal listening, or public exhibition; web sites; or graphics. Some videos may be put up as well. The main aspect of this site, though, is the music. So give it a listen! Thanks!

NOTE: I attempted to create the graphics in Photoshop and apply them to the site. I am not fluent in Photoshop, and those are the only ideas that came to me. So please bear with me! I also have a friend of mine creating a format for the site, but he has not finished it yet, and I wanted to see what y'all thought about this one.

EDIT 1: Unneeded closing [/url] link at the end.
EDIT 2: To tell you what edits I made.

Pretty impressive. It loaded quite fast, and I like the information box on the right. Are you going to get your own domain name or will you stay with the current subdomain of the hosting company? Also: I am sure you know about this, but there are not meta tags yet...

John.

For now, I plan on staying with Aerocore because it's free (for me, at least) and I get enough space. But once I get my own paid domain name, I'll switch to it. The only downside to that is the URL has to be _______.aerocore.net, but I'm willing to live with that if I get all the benefits of all those other popular .com's, like FTP and hosting whatever files I want, and high transfer speeds. Even PHP!

And I plan on putting meta tags in once I release the format I choose. I don't really want search engines to put the site in their search results while it's in a folder on the site rather than the root.

This site is well-focused on its content. Overall, I would say it is rather good. I would not recommend changing the overall design or graphics. It is nice the way it is. It has a few serious bad aspects:

1. Use alt attributes on images.
2. Scrolling text: It either scrolls too fast or too slow -- never at the user's ideal reading speed. It would be much more tasteful to put the text on the screen. Without it moving.

3. "This site was designed for 1024x768, but 800x600 is acceptable as well. Best viewed with Internet Explorer."

The page looks equal in Gecko and IE, and nobody needs to be told that their resolution sucks. You will only piss off visitors with this line, and if it were true, it would indicate that you were incompetent. Fortunately, it is not true; aesthetics are different but equal in different browsers.

4. Underlined headings: People will think they are hyperlinks and try to click them. Underlining is kind of ugly too.

5. Alt attributes. I'm just going to say it again, because alt attributes are important.

6. Font size. The font of the right hand column is rediculously tiny. It seems as if you don't want people to be reading the right hand side with the miniscule font and scrolling and all

Other than those important and easily fixable things, I really like the design. It is simple and content-focused. In its present state, I'd say the information box on the right is crap (until you turn off the scrollage).

People talk about meta tags, but they do not matter too much. Good search engines mostly ignore them, and they don't help users. But they don't hurt . By the way, if you want search engines to ignore your current page, use a robots.txt file.

Stick with the graphics you have. They have a warm look to them, which most Web sites lack.

Hmm... perhaps I could take that little res notification out and make the page able to stretch to the size of the browser at any resolution. At the same time, I could make the Information text larger and non-scrolling. But this design called for filling up space with not very much text, which is why everything turned out so... "small." All of the hyperlinks are clearly green. Other people have said they like the scrolling text, though. I tried to get it at an ideal reading scroll speed, but even with the scroll amount at 1, it still goes too fast. Maybe I should mess with scroll delay...

Keep hitting me with suggestions!

I like the color scheme and the big green border is nice. I dont like the small vertical green bars inside. As for the music section, I would assume that eventually you will have many many songs, so you should think about putting into place some way of sorting the songs. Maybe even add a search for the songs. I don't think there is any problem witha fixed size where in larger resolutions the black just fills the edges and the green box remains centered on screen...

cute site.

Why you have the links on your left hand side half outside the green box? Same goes for the title of the site.

The text is really small and hard to read in the scrolling box.

I'm confused about the links section & the random section. They both seem to be linking websites? Why not stick to one section?

The words "jon nelson" are underlined. Be careful about using underlined text as it confuses the viewer, they may think it a link. Plus the u element was deprecated (element or attribute is one that has been outdated) in HTML 4.01 and is not supported in XHTML 1.0 Strict DTD.

Nice mp3s! I downloaded some to take a listen

The links are half outside the box for design effect. I just thought it looked cool. As for the Random and Links sections: Random is for miscellaneous digital works I have created, like Web sites. Links is the only linking page.

Thanks for listenin'!