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Asking for a review on a relatively new (but production ready) website. As my Title says, what I`m looking for is some feedback on how professional and secure the site appears. In short, if you were a musician or a fan coming to this site for the first time, would you feel confident buying/posting music. One quick caveat: The site has only been up for a couple of weeks and I`m in the process of recruiting musicians. So please keep that in mind (in other words, I know it`s a knock against the sites "feel" to only see three bands posted).

Site URL:
http://www.barbarianmusic.com

Site Goals:
The site is guided by the following principle (and our motto): Connecting independent musicians with their local music fans. To accomplish this, we offer the following two services:
1) Help independent musicians sell their music and merchandise online, build street teams, and promote their upcoming shows.
2) Help music fans find, purchase, and download music, find out about upcoming performances, and buy merchandise online.

Design:
I designed and coded all pages except for the home page, the logo, and the page templates (side bar, header, footer).

Lastly, I am well aware that this site has a lot of features to add and probably stylistic and design improvements to make. My skin is relatively thick and I will very much appreciate honest critiques.

Thank you.

Hi Matt, :-)
I remember this site, and it`s good to see you proceeding. I`m using FireFox 1.x, and when I tried to "Create an Account," got a pop-up message that FF was "unable to verify the ownership as a trusted site."

I`m not a Web designer, so I don`t know exactly what to do about this, or why it popped up. However, since I rarely get a notification that a site has some sort of certificate, there`s clearly an issue here. Let`s see if some Web developers can shed some light on the problem.

Craig, thanks for the feedback. I`ve mostly only been testing the site on Firefox 2.0, IE6, and IE7 and haven`t had any problems with security warnings (although there were lots of other great cross-browser bugs that had to be fixed). I`ll try to see if I can find a 1.x browser and run it on one of my other computers.

I really appreciate your taking a look at it.

I think the front page is nice. Very readable.

I find it odd that the margins on the "musician contest" page are different than those on the "music search", "show search" and "about" pages. I think I like the margins on the contest page best. Or maybe something between the 2.

Your titles for all the pages are the same, and they should be different.

I didn`t try creating an account, but I didn`t get any errors going to those pages.

Overall, looking pretty good there!

Hi,

Viewing the site on IE7, with and LCD screen onr high speed connection.

The one thing that pops out at the viewer is the significant difference between the look and layout of the home page and your other web pages. A more consistant look may be appreciated .

I wasn`t a big fan of the faded blue color of the links on the home page... maybe because that color combination is not carried throughout the website.

I suggest you add a mouseover efect to your menu and other links. This is user friendly and helps the viewer to know where they are on the web page.

~Roland

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Web Design | Best Beef Jerky | ecommerce articles | Follow vwebworld on Twitter

Hi,

The site does not look consistant due to the page layout differences between the home and the rest of the pages.  Also the about page does not have the same links on the left side as the other pages.

Webster

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A relationship without trust is not much of a relationship.
www.adaptivesolutionsinc.com

Thank you all for the great feedback.

nhgnikole:
I have been planning to change the titles for my pages - I`ll bump it`s priority.
I added the contest page late and I`ll look at making it`s margin`s more inline with the rest of the site (or making them inline with it if it looks better).

vwebworld:
webmaster:
I wasn`t sure how drastically different the pages would look. I`ll work with my web designer to see if we can come up with a slightly better design for the other pages to bring them inline with the home page.

Kathy:
I like my logo in the background, too, but have been worried a little bit about readability. I`ll play around with the background alpha value a bit more and see how it looks.

Once again, thank you all for the information.

It`s common to have more than one layout on a site ... front page vs secondary pages.

I think the reason why it looks so different is perhaps because you suddenly have so much white, and you go from a centered layout to a full-screen one. Maybe you can play with those a little so you can keep your front page and not lose the rest.

Hi Matt,

Love that you are working with independent artists.  I`m a huge indie fan myself.  A few first impressions:  For me, it would probably work better if you used images/buttons instead of web fonts for your main menu.  As traditional as underlined links are, from a visual standpoint, I think they reduce the "professional" look at times.  If you decide to keep it the same way, it might look better to use an alternative color to purple.  The rest of the front page appears to have an earth tone feel, and the purple although noticable, doesn`t blend too well with the rest of the colors.  Hope these first impressions helped. =]



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I think your site looks very professional.

The logo in the about us page did make reading difficult for me.

 

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Zai