Music band website

[miguelkp]

Note: I'm looking for feedback only for the design itself. Regardless of your musical tastes and/or ideology, I mean.

Fixed this -> Don't know why but it seems to load too slowly right now. Usually it doesn't take too much, since the website is hosted in Illuminated server... Yesterday, for instance, it was loading quite faster. Strange.
Fortunately, page only needs to load at the beggining. After the preload, every piece of info in the page is fully accesible without reloading the website, via jQuery.

I think it should load quite faster now.

The website's URL:
http://konsumopropio.com

 

[eggo9432]

The design of the site is good. To increase speed you could enable output_buffering and zlib.output_compression, that worked for me. However, it mostly speeds up php and I don't know how much of that your site uses. I might also add a button to convert to other languages, unless that does not make a difference to you and most of your users are in another country. Just a side note, I actually really like your music and if you wanted to, you could use http://www.pearlsquirrel.com/ for hosting it, or just check it out. You might like it because its for musicians just like you. Good work and keep it up!

 

[miguelkp]

First of all, thanks

About Pearl Squirrel, very interesting, indeed. I'll check it out, no doubt.

About the language button, it's just what you said: main target public (about 95% I would dare to say) is Spanish/Latin American people. I'd study it, anyway, maybe the Google translator selectable combo for instance. It's far from being the best of the translations but... better than nothing, that's sure.

About the low speed, yes, it was partly due to PHP scripts. I managed to fix it.


Large explanation:

We have a Google account for the band and our site reads that Google account through Google APIs to show info (news -> Blogger articles; concerts -> Calendar events; Photos -> Picasa albums/photos; Videos -> Youtube playlist/videos). I made it this way so adding content is a piece of cake. An example: I add a Blogger article, the New appears automatically next time you reload the website. Although it has advantages (no need to handle source code php/html files, no need to make a back-end system to manage content, no need to have access to FTP or cPanel, just a web browser), the main problem is the approach I used:

1. Before, the data was read every time the website is visited by an user; the PHP scripts read Blogger, Calendar, Picasa and Youtube. 6 loops altogether, hence the quite high load time.
2. Now, I addapted those PHP scripts so, instead of echo data to screen, they fwrite data to new plain PHP files that are then included by the main, index.php file.

So, each time I add content, I run the script and the PHP files that are included by index are re-written. This way, Google has to be read only once each time we add new content, thus avoiding server overloading with redundant work. When users load the site, their browsers only read those (how to say? Pre-rendered?) PHP files; strictly speaking, there are no 'scripts', loops or Google readings.
Furthermore, this way I can also test the changes in content before making them eventually public. I mean, I add a new in Blogger, I run the script in my computer with WAMP, ensure that the new content fits well in local mode, then run the script in the server and the new content is accessible to everyone.

Right now the script is very rudimentary. It's functional but lacks on GUI and reads all data, then re-writes all files. I'll improve it soon (hopefully) with buttons to make possible to read and re-write only the needed file: news+concerts (share file), photos or videos.

And thats all XD

Well, thanks again for your comment :wink:

 

[eggo9432]

i thought that I should comment again and just tell you how much I like the colors of the site. They all blend together very well. Also, I saw that you created an account, which happened the be at the same exact time that I was updating my database php script. Therefore, your page was glitched and you probably saw that. I am very sorry about that. I fixed everything. You should now be able to customize your page and it should work smoothly now. Sorry for that inconvenience. Also, thank you for uploading a song! If there is anything that you think I could add to the site to add to your experience, just tell me and I should have it running within 24 hours. I am also wokring on a song editor, which will be ready soon, so that is on the way.

 

[miguelkp]

Thanks for the compliments I finally added the "change language" option. It uses Google translator, so it's far from being the perfect solution. But anyway, can help a bit.

About your website, I was about to contact you to ask if there was a problem hahaha. I see that Murphy's Law attacks again: I create account when you're updating the website XD Don't worry. That kind of things happens.
The song I uploaded is just the 'intro', not even a 'song' strictly speaking. I'll gradually upload the other 20 songs.

 

[bulletcleaners25]

I like it, the theme is nice, could probably do with a few tweaks but overall really nice. On the home page I would either extend Concerts to the end, or maybe move it out of there and try somewhere else or even put some other data on the other side. I changed my language to English and it was still alright to read, obviously images I still couldn't tell what they said but you could still get what the site was about.

 

[eggo9432]

The change language option is very nice and works quite well. Thanks for the update and good work!

 

[miguelkp]

I like it, the theme is nice, could probably do with a few tweaks but overall really nice. On the home page I would either extend Concerts to the end, or maybe move it out of there and try somewhere else or even put some other data on the other side. I changed my language to English and it was still alright to read, obviously images I still couldn't tell what they said but you could still get what the site was about.

Thanks. Thing is that the concerts section now seems broken just because there are no concerts XD
When there are events, a calendar appears (by the way, it seems to work a bit badly with a translation activated):





If you select one date, this appears:

 

[jomppasp]

Very nice site, i liked, you have made good work, well done keep it up!

 

[essellar]

I'm ordinarily okey-dokey with the glossy (or glassy) gradients and so on, especially with a light-on-dark site. In fact, I'm kind of stuck on the look, and have to force myself to do things other ways when designing other people's sites, but...

... but there's a circle-A with a 'hawk right there at the top. I may be a bald old fart now, but I was a hard-core kind of guy back in the day. You know: DK, DOA, SNFU, Circle Jerks, Black Flag, Corrosion of Conformity... that bunch. I listened hard, sang hoarse, had pins in my face, worked on 'zines, the whole trip. And glossy red gradients ain't doin' it for me. I like the scratched graffiti font and the graphics in general, but the gradients don't fit. If you make a tiny concession to load time and replace the gradient with, say, a predominantly red-and-rust distressed texture graphic (you can include a tileable 8-bit PNG directly in your style sheet using a data: URI), the whole thing would come together much better thematically.

Apart from that bit of punk snobbery, congrats on bringing all of the data together in one place so well. Looks (mostly) good and works well.

 

[miguelkp]

Thanks for your replies.
I specially appreciate yours, essellar. I'm looking for a good-looking rust/grunge texture. I'm making some tests with just a simple rust texture but I don't like it too much, I prefer the glossy style.
Maybe I'll have to try it with an overlay horizontal gradient (black-transp-black). And will probably need to apply some text shadow to text above the textures.

Thanks again.