PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

Hi all,
Just out of hospital after having an operation on my ear.
I haven't been able to focus on my music for quite some time due to ear problems.... so..... I've been spending a bit of time re-thinking and planning my own web site to offer up my music.

I have changed my "act" name to AUDIO IRONY.
I would appreciate your feeback on the look of my site.
It's bound to be slow as it's just running off a spare computer at home at this point.
It's by no means complete or even fully functional. I'm not a great html (et al) expert - so I just used Apple's iWeb program to create most of the content.

I have set up a phpbb forum and would appreciate if you would sign up there and provide feedback on my forum so that I can test if that is all working.
Anyway - if you're curious - the address is:
Audio Irony

Regards
Brett - A.I

just a quick note to make it faster;

Use .jpg format for your images instead of .png. will make it MUCH faster!

Yeah thanks mate.
The original pics were jpg - but iWeb converts them into png . . . when it's done and I'm finished with iWeb - I'll go through and "Hinder evolution"


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: blgrace on 2006-06-27 17:42 ]</font>

Brett, your site seems to need the apple quicktime plug-in, which I think maybe a lot of windows users won't like!. That's not so good! Think.. asking a mac user to install Micro$oft crap.

The other thing i need to mention is the special effect on a couple of pages. It's the main image which has a vertical wipe effect fading the image in. It may just be personal taste, but I don't like the effect. It 'looks' like a poor/sad effect which adds distraction to the page for no reason. The image is fine, but would be better if it was just there without FX.

Hope you don't mind the comments & if you need any help send me a PM. I can also put you onto a programmer friend of our's who's VERY clued up on 'current' web coding, XHTML compliant sites for cross-browser compatibility etc, who I don't think would be expensive.

you can call it a vertical wipe effect, or you can call it an oversized image (close to 400kb) which takes time to load

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: piddi on 2006-06-28 05:29 ]</font>

40k would be more than enough.
The site is much too slow, it doesn't work this way

Great - thanks very much for the feedback - that's what I need to know.
I can work on image size, format and cheesy effects ( which apple calls "Reflection")
I'm not sure about how much of the site needs Quicktime.
There's a little intro sound on the Welcome page that you can choose to play if you want.
Like I said- I coded nothing - just let Apple's iWeb do it all for me as I really don't have a clue.
Can you tell me which bits don't work Shroomz

No Sorry mate, I'm affraid I'm not a user of apple QuickTime & don't want to be. That's my point really. Any embedded QT stuff will promt say Firefox or whatever browser on a PC to tell the user the page has content which needs apple's plug-in to be installed. Some people who visit your site will have the plug installed & some won't, which is an issue if half of them don't want to install the plug-in, but it depends if it's just a little sound effect they're missing or something more important.

I use quicktime alternative. Nice site. I like the peeling paint. Are you going industrial? How is your ear? Is it hard to mix stereo? What language is that in your blog?

It looks strangely like Latin.

Site looks decent. Nice name by the way

Some people who visit your site will have the plug installed & some won't, which is an issue if half of them don't want to install the plug-in, but it depends if it's just a little sound effect they're missing or something more important.

Yeah - I think it might be easier to just get rid of it since it's just a sound byte from one of the tunes that's there free to download anyway. Thanks.
I have reduced the size of all the graphics to between 20-40k - hope this speeds things up.
Regards
Brett (AI)

The latin text is just "copy" that iWeb throws in for lay-out.
I just haven't changed that bit over yet.
I'm still working on getting my head around this stuff.
As I said in previous post - I have now gone through and manually resized all the graphics to between 20-40k.
Seems iWeb saves files as PNG if they have any transparancy effects on them. - I have removed those cheesy effects as well.

Would anyone mind just follwing the link to the forum (phpbb) page and just signing up so I can see if my local smtp server is working or getting blocked.
I'm using dynamic DNS - some email servers refuse to accept email as it's suspected as being spam.....
Steep learning curve....

I've got a tip for you to speed this up a lot. What's really slowing it down is the horizontal animated menu at the top (obviously an iweb thingie). Basically at the moment, not only does Internet Explorer not handle it's fade left to right animation properly (shows messed up in IE till fully loaded), but both IE & firefox are loading the animation & replaying it for every page in your site, which means IE users will see your top menu messed up on every page till it loads.

What you really want with a main navigation menu is something more static which loads with your home page then stays there between pages without reloading because it's just an image or 2 with some links on top, duplicated for each page, so already cashed. It's not too difficult to keep your navigation menu in a css file which would be used for every page instead of embedded in the html code for every page, which would be a step up again.

Bottom line on the top menu is that it's probably best to loose the animated one, as it's slowing down your site quite a lot (and that's coming from a 10meg broadband user)

Well it seems I'll have to give up on iWeb - it's quite crap.
I didn't realise that nav bar was seperate for EVERY page.... damn....

Well - it seems it's back to the drawing board and a text editor and a book

No, buy RapidWeaver
A serious review in MacFan gives it high ratings.
Very Userfriendly, professional sjablones, great interface ('derived' from Apple's iLife), podcasting (it does RSS feed generation), free form design, etc.
They even said, Apple could buy it as a kind of an 'iWeb', the lacking software in iLife, the review was in November 2005
Price: €30,- (!)

I will redesign all my (3) photo web pages in RapidWeaver as soon as possible

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: hubird on 2006-06-28 15:12 ]</font>

I'd like to see the output of this rapidweaver, as every other 'weaver' including the almighty 'dream' spits out absolute garbage code-wise, which means sites are half as fast as they could & should be and use the likes of flash or javascript when it's not even needed!!

Bloated code = SLOW WEBSITE

Visit W3C, read the tutorials & you'll be rocking, even if the code's not pretty like mine

Thanks Hub.... I'll check out RapidWeaver.

I'm getting good reports of speed and no errors with the navigation bar from friends I have just emailed.

Maybe it's dependent on:
1. where you live
2. the time of day
3. what tasks my server box is doing at the time
3. what editing I'm doing on pages

Hub and shroomz - would you mind checking my site again when you get a chance and let me know what you find...
Appreciate it

I don't see any animation going on

Navigating is still too slow indeed, but do-able already

I bet RapidWeaver will do the job, at least I can trust MacFan here

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: hubird on 2006-06-28 19:05 ]</font>

It can't be 1 or 2 for me here Brett, as this broadband connection here delivers download speeds up to 700 KB/s.

Anyway, I checked it again & with mozilla it's just a bit slow. IE6 (bag of shit) on the other hand, is still displaying the top menu messed up while it loads from left to right. I checked the homepage code for the navbar/top menu & it's slow because it's using png image files & javascript for the rollover states instead of the simpler & faster css & html over a navbar background image. It's normal for these build a web page in a jiffy programs to spit out this crap. Even Higher End apps like Dreamweaver or Imageready spit out bloated javascript for a button rollover or navbar/menu of links with rollover states. Look at lines 30-49 in your code & you'll see the navbar using pngs for rollovers. It seems it may be using transparent pngs which would be why IE6 displays it messed up while loading, as IE6 doesn't have properly implemented support for transparent pngs!!