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Your expert opinions, please
Resident_Lurker - Jun 22, 2004
  Resident_Lurker Jun 22, 2004
I've constructed a new site HERE..., and I'd appreciate it if you guys would take a look at it and give me some feedback.

Before you mention the grey backgrounds behind some of the images on the front page, I'll tell you that it's due to IE's mishandling of transparent PNGs. In fact, it mishandles some other parts of the site as well. Firefox displays it flawlessly. It's otherwise fine in IE. I tried the GIF format, but it really ruins the images. It has no capacity for color. Guess I'll have to make the backgrounds solid. <_<

The browse function works, but for the "by album name" function, all it can do is list every single album in the database alphabetically. Once you click a letter, it defaults back to artist name. Oh well.

Not sure about the name either. It could change, but right now it's simple and it makes sense.

That's all I have to say for now.

Oh, and this isn't spam. The true spam will arrive later when it gets its own domain.

 ExCyber Jun 22, 2004
Okay, first things first, you really need to shrink that rush.png somehow. An image that small and with that much whitespace has no business being 100+KB.

Aside from that, I don't see anything that I'm qualified to comment on when I'm this tired. I'll take a deeper look tomorrow.

 racketboy Jun 22, 2004
looks nice!

but to be critical I'll say that the letters on the logo are to thin and that I'm unsure what the title screen in the lower right corner is for (ttl4.jpg)

 Resident_Lurker Jun 22, 2004
Fixed. Original image here... for comparison.

 Resident_Lurker Jun 22, 2004
Racket: The logo will probably be changed. I set that there kind of as a placeholder anyway. I do like that font though.

The title screens randomly change between each visit. I put it there for no reason other than I could, and it added color. Do you think it's out of place?

Thanks for the help so far, guys.

 racketboy Jun 23, 2004
yeah it is out of place.

If you're gonna have it, I would put it on the sidebar.

But my personal preference is simplicty -- less is more.

 it290 Jun 23, 2004
I find the design clean and functional, but perhaps the sidebar could use a little bit more. Not aesthetically, but utility-wise. It lets you move around the site quickly, which is good, but it needs to have some context-sensitivity as well, IMHO.

Also, I love the idea of the site, but are you going to offer downloads?

 Resident_Lurker Jun 23, 2004
I'm probably not going to offer downloads, as there are many other great places that offer MP3s of VGM, such as the Usenet,

#gamemp3s... etc. They do it better than I probably ever would.

What I might do is add a small clip for each album, just to give users an idea of what it sounds like.

I don't really have the monetary resources for a big bandwidth-hogging site. (that's a more tactful way of saying I'm poor).

 racketboy Jun 23, 2004
how long have you spent on this site? your database is pretty big.

thanks for that other link, BTW, I'll be checking that out more tommorow

 Resident_Lurker Jun 23, 2004
I had always just used it as a personal database to catalogue all the stuff I had in MP3 format, so it's been around for a while. Only this month did I decide to overhaul it and make it a public site.

There's also Anime-game-OSTs....

Edit: By the way, does anyone know how to use regular point size fonts in HTML documents? I truly do not understand when or why a switch was made to these crazy +1, +2, -1 etc. sizes. I can't relate to that! How about good ol' size 12 or size 16.

Why, back when we didn't have all these newfangled doohickies like PHP and ASP and HTML 4.01, you had to code all your HTML by hand. And if I said by god, it would be size 16.

 gameboy900 Jun 26, 2004
Ditch the huge image at the top of the start page. Scrolling down to see the content of your main page is not good and hard for people to see quickly if any new news is added.

 racketboy Jun 26, 2004
yeah -- now that you have more front page content, the graphic needs to go or be smaller.

maybe come up with one that is long and narrow to go across the top

 gameboy900 Jun 26, 2004
Yes you have this big blue bar at the top of the page just begging for an image.

 Resident_Lurker Jun 27, 2004
I was trying to take your suggestion, gameboy, by adding an image of some sort to the top right-hand corner, but it's proving difficult.

Would it be possible to split the cell at the top, so that I have one wider cell and a smaller one on the right for an image? And how can I get images to cling to the cell/table borders? I always have this space between the cell borders and images.

 racketboy Jun 27, 2004
have a zero-sized cell spacer and border?

 Jedi Master Thrash Jun 27, 2004
A tip on GIFs: Don't let the GIF compressor do the downsampling from 16-million colors to 256 colors for you. It will just do a quick and dirty color assignment, which as you've discovered, looks pretty bad.

Instead, first use the "reduce color depth" feature of photoshop/paintshop to reduce the image from 24-bit to 8-bit using Optimized Oct-tree as the Palette, and Error Diffusion as the reduction method. You'll be absolutely amazed at how close the reduced 256 color version looks to the original 24-bit color version.

Actually with the picture I was testing out before writing this, Standard Palette was even better than Oct-tree (for unknown reasons), and I couldn't see any visible change between the original and the reduced picture.

Now that it's been intelligently reduced to 256 colors, run the GIF compressor on it. You won't get quite as good of a compression ratio, but it'll look great.

JMT.

 Resident_Lurker Jun 27, 2004
Thanks for the tip, JMT. I'll try converting some of the PNGs to GIFs all the while retaining the transparency information. It's too bad IE can't use PNGs correctly.

racket: What do you mean by a cell spacer and border? Tables have never been my forte.

 mtxblau Jun 28, 2004
All about the tables:

http://www.webstyleguide.com/page/tables.html...