Woo hoo, we have a real website! Please critique....

[doctorpunch]

www.killjoymetal.com

Obviously, still in progress. But eons better than a crappy Facebook.

All critiques/praises/ crappings upon are welcome. Let's hear it.

[Kbone_ATL]

Looking good, good start.

Could get a couple hotter girls for your shirts.... (sorry if these are your sisters/wives/gf's

[Band Dad]

Looks great. Very professional. Of course, I just had to check the t-shirt models. Hot enough for me. Good job.

[NateS]

digging the site, and the music - the only thing i would say is that i prefer music players to not auto-start when i load a page. i'm gonna click play, but i need to pause my own music first...

need to put music online to download!!!!!! hook a brotha up!

[Kbone_ATL]

Originally Posted by bassk81976

digging the site, and the music - the only thing i would say is that i prefer music players to not auto-start when i load a page. i'm gonna click play, but i need to pause my own music first...

need to put music online to download!!!!!! hook a brotha up!

My old band debated this for awhile and did turn it off, so you had to manually start the music. That way if people are work surfing around it won't blast the warning you are not working~

The page is fast and responsive, which is a key factor. If I see images or content loading before my eyes, I close.

[Tampabass]

I'm not a metal fan, but I think the site is really well done. Appealing, eye-catching layout, easy to navigate, quality content. And the t-shirt models are just fine by me, too.

[MNAirHead]

Auto loaders will get your customers in trouble.. many office computers will default to the onboard speaker when a full sound card isn't available.

In this text block include stuff about your band.. google bots really can't look at flash and pix. "We are an original heavy metal band from Long Island, New York. Come on in, check out some pics, visit our links and see us live at a venue near you!"

Put some text on the page to read while your reverb nation widgets are loading...

------


Overall it's a nice straight forward site.... biggest need is to test it on slow dialup or wireless connections.... the primary pages being text greatly helps this.

On the upside.. it's clean .. finally a band with pro pix.



Tim

[Bassdirty]

Nice ness.

[Johnius]

A professionally done website? SO not metal. Have we not been through this recently?

Good luck, doctor.

[mambo4]

excellent job, you do everything that band web page ought to.
One look and I know:
-what kind of band you are
-where to get your record
-where to see you live
-weather you are hot chicks or not

The embedded map to where you are playign next is a WIN, I will have to talk to my band about that one.

the only thing I could suggest is to add smaller versions of those dang social network buttons to the front page to people can more easily "FB like" or "tweet" etc...

one caution would be that it is a lot of flash content, which might cause people to bail while loading , tho these days it's less of an issue. But as an experiment i'd check it out in a non -flash enabled browser and see how much straight HTML conveys.

I say all this as a web artteest by day...

[Spinal Tapper]

Not bad! Merch page looks good. The girls are hot IMO! Especially for a burly metal band like yourselves

My only critique is have a way to keep scrolling through pictures without having to click the "back" button on the browser. Maybe have all of the thumbnails embedded at the top of the page as you look through pix.
Generally, people hate clicking the "back" button.

EDIT: And a way to click to different albums while looking at one album of pics (i.e. a link on the left side with all of the available photo album names)

I'm just bein picky though. Nice site.

EDIT AGAIN: Sorry, I didn't see the link above the top right of the pics to go back to the gallery, etc. Maybe just make that stand out a bit and you're good to go.

[doctorpunch]

Thanks for the input guys, I'm glad to hear a lot of positive reviews but if ANYTHING turns you off I want to hear it.

The autoload will certainly be addressed especially considering the first song that plays lol.

[LilRay]

Very nice! I especially liked Ms. Fuzzy Boots.



God Bless, Ray

[zachoff]

Those plugins take way too long to load. Otherwise, it works and looks good!

[blues.bass]

Originally Posted by Tampabass

I'm not a metal fan, but I think the site is really well done. Appealing, eye-catching layout, easy to navigate, quality content. And the t-shirt models are just fine by me, too.

^ This...

Originally Posted by bassk81976

digging the site, and the music - the only thing i would say is that i prefer music players to not auto-start when i load a page. i'm gonna click play, but i need to pause my own music first...

^ This...

Originally Posted by zachoff

Those plugins take way too long to load. Otherwise, it works and looks good!

^ And this.

Our web site (www.theflamingmudcats.com) uses the ReverbNation plugins too. If you know of a way to "speed" them up, I'd been keen to hear although I suspect there isn't from our end of this.

[jsh008]

Very nicely done! I'm kinda with the others that talked about not autoloading the music. I do alot of work browsing as well . . .so having a song start blasting while I'm on the phone isn't real cool.

[Waterpilot]

I like it! +1 to not having the music start up. Though... Regular visitors will remember to turn down if need be I suppose.

The only thing I didn't like was losing the music when going to the different pages... I'd rather be able to move around on your site while listening instead of looking at your ugly mugs the whole time.

I have no affiliation to Julie Slick but her's is the only website I can think of off hand to show what I'm talking about...

http://julieslick.com/

[bolophonic]

Looks awesome and sounds great. I think your merch page is perfect the way it is.

[Ripley]

I work on small web sites for a living, and overall it looks really good, imo. A couple thoughts, based only on my design preferences. (and understanding that it's still under construction)

One thing I noticed right away is the text in the body of the pages is hard to read. A slightly bigger, bolder font would be easier to read against that scattered gray background.

I agree with mambo, I'd put the social media stuff on every page, unless you don't use FB and Twitter very much.

Photos - The gallery links could be a little more obvious. There's nothing really pointing out that you can click on the date/venue to see pics.

Autoload for music is not very popular these days, and if it were my design, I'd only put the player on the Music page. (I noticed there's a player on your Schedule page, as well.)

And the big one - there's no contact info or link on any of your pages.

As I said, I like the site. It's clean and simple, which makes for a better experience and keeps people on the site longer. Nice job!

[Adam Bomb]

Found this thread by accident and had to go check out the merch chix. They are hawt. Specially the one with the legs.

Didn't really look at the rest of the site. Good job.

--Bomb