Re: Please Look at http://www.rustkings.com/

>>> Tenley Shewmake <tenley(at)awebresource.com> 4/15/2004 7:55:53 AM >>>
Please have a look at this new site: http://www.rustkings.com/. 

A nice site. I love the color palette as it looks ... rusty. Most of
the content links I would expect to find at a musician's site are there,
and the content seems appropriately well written.

Viewed with IE 5.5, (Win 98), 1024x768, T1 line.

* Fonts - The Rust Kings image at the top of each page,
rustkingsviner2.gif, is a nice font, but then so is the other font used
on the rust-kings-square2.gif logo just below the left menu, and the
other font used on the bands T-shirts. From an image branding
perspective, they need to pick a look and be consistent with it.

* Image sizes - you might try compressing your gifs a little more. With
the minimal number of colors you'll be needing, you can probably get a
close enough appearance at about 20 percent of the file size. Perhaps
not, but it would be worth looking into.

* The purple visited links on the dark background content area are hard
to see, especially for someone who is color blind.
   Also, the menu links don't show up for me when I hover over them.
They turn white, but my background is also white. Probably, your
background image is not showing.

* Americana Music News page - is this news from the Americana Music
Assoc.?  The Current Events section and the Band Newsletter section are
both set apart (somewhat) by an underline. The News Archive section is
not separated and is very hard to find.
And as an aside, you might want to check into the way the Adobe icon is
displayed. Adobe expressly forbids altering its size.

* The Calendar - it's just mho of course, but I'm not feelin' it. The
fact that it doesn't look like the rest of the site is a distraction,
the links to Clubs, Festivals, CD Releases, and News don't work (but
News & Events link does work), and I can't see the events unless happen
to mouse over a date that has an associated event. That makes it
cumbersome to use. The events that do display are not formatted in a
common way either.  Some of them don't have standard space and comma
placement, and the @ symbol is used way much - i.e. Rust Kings Acoustic
Show Weekly @ The Sweet Shoppe Lewisburg WV Starts @ 8 Just Jeanne &
Allan.  For a long time I didn't know that I could click on a day to
make the event stay displayed on the page.

* The photo gallery is very nice. There are pictures there. As someone
interested in finding out more about the band, I'd want to see more
photos of the singers. As someone who's looked at band websites a time
or two before, I expect more photos will be coming.

* The Music Downloads link was disappointing - I couldn't find any to
download.

* On the Contact & Booking page, the link to Jeanne Hoffman is broken
with an extra "http://" in the anchor tag.

  The css layout works nicely and the overall look is good. I like it
that you didn't try to cram too much on every page. 
The e-commerce will make a nice addition to well put together site.

Hope you find these comments as constructive as intended.

Sincerely,
Dennis K

HTML: hwg-critique mailing list archives, maintained by Webmaster @ IWA