review my new site

[mikeandike22]

my friend has a band names eating mr anderson (yeah the name is weird but they are good). now he has an old site which is http://www.geocities.com/eatingmranderson and he does not maintain the content himself so he asked me how you would do that and i gave him some books on html and general web design.
then i built this test site for him just to give him some ideas.
this site is built with a more corprate style:
http://willpull22.remnetworks.com/EMA
and this site was supposed to be less corprate and i used some of there album colors:
http://www.eatingmranderson.tk

what do you think and which one do you think is better for a band's web page.

[Killer_Typo]

all of them need alot alot of work in design and layout. not much time right now to say what. but i would deff recomend just browsing the net checking out sites you like and try to emulate their look and feel. you will improve much that way.

[mikeandike22]

most of my sites look a lot worse in internet explorer for some reason
and isnt just finding things online that i like just stealing ideas from other ppl and not doing your own creative work.

[Lafinboy]

If your sites look a lot worse in IE it is because you are not designing for them. If you are not designing for them you are doing yourself and your clients an injustice. I'm no fan of M$, but simple logic dictates that if 75% of your prospective audience use IE then you had better look after them. Making a website cross browser compatible is not extremely hard, it just takes willingness and a bit of planning. You should also take into consideration the various monitor sizes being used and design for the majority value. Your sample sites required vertical and horizontal (a big usability no-no) scrolling, even on a 1024x768 screen, the de-facto standard.

Searching the net and taking ideas from sites you like the look of is not stealing, it's getting inspiration. I don't think the suggestion was that you visit another bands site and copy it verbatim. Rather that you research what other sites, not only band sites, are doing, and get ideas about look, layout, colourschemes, etc. Every designer in every field does this. They take inspiration from everything around them. As a designer, the only way you could not do this is if you were locked in a windowless, featureless room from birth, with no visual stimulation. But then you wouldn't be able to design because you would have no reference points.

From a design point of view the sample sites lack any focus or impact. There's nothing there that jumps out. From a usability point of view you would score extremely low on a Niellsen rating.

Have a look around at what other sites are doing, in all fields - business, entertainment, personal, sport - and start getting inspiration from them. And visit http://www.useit.com/ and read up on Jakob Nielsens Web Usability guidelines. You can learn a lot from that site alone about the layout and functionality of your sites.

[DaveSW]

Personally I'd say there's too many graphics - slow loading.

[mikeandike22]

yeah i have just started web design and i am not that great i would like to learn how to use css better does anybody no any good tutorials if it is in video format that would be awesome. when i said that they look different in ie it is because when i uploaded from dreamweaver i looked at my site in firefox and just recently saw what it looks like in internet explorer i tried to level it out using contribute but then the same thing happened now somethings look worse in mozilla (the worst problem i have right now is that in ie the text always get bigger and bolder than the original).

[DaveSW]

w3schools.com are pretty good.

[Young Teck 06]

What it needs, is a little spicing up. Possibly build a Photoshop template. You want to make their site 2 things, corporate standard and make it look cool. Dont give it an high corporate look or it may look like a different business.

Search some template site (http://www.freesitelayouts.com) or http://www.freewebtemplates.com and that should give you some idea. Have them look at the files and the page itself and to look over http://www.webmonkey.com for coding help.

Hope I helped you out......

[Cup of Squirrel]

Oh dear.....

[mikeandike22]

Young teck, and Davesw thanks for your help i will get started on doing some of those things as soon as i have free time.
Cup of squirrels pls dont post if you dont have anything useful to say.

[Young Teck 06]

Glad I could help.....

[acijess]

The site is incomplete.

[A Monkeys Uncle]

I'd have to go with the black and gold site, but put something under "Contact Us" ASAP!

[Young Teck 06]

I agree with AMU