Members wheresgrant3 Posted January 10, 2012 Members Share Posted January 10, 2012 I've put in alot of hours over the last month redesigning our website. I worked with a local designer and although the design itself is not 100% what I was looking for it is 100X's more managable than our previous website. They say a fresh eye can make a better picture... I'd like any opinions on the new site and maybe advice on what's missing. Keep in mind we're well established. There's no need for long introductions to the general community. http://www.nutsinablender.com Do you think this existing site helps to 'sell the band' or is there more work that needs to be done? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members kmart Posted January 10, 2012 Members Share Posted January 10, 2012 10 second commentary: Is the "Happy New Year...from Nuts" text necessary, especially since that's almost identical to the text that accompanies one of the scrolling vid pics just below it? I'd remove the header and bring the scrolling section below it up, which also allows for more content that's below the fold to be above, etc. I am not such a fan of the 'run sectionheader titlewords together but in differentcolors' thing. Section "Recent Tweet"...suggest you change to "Recent Tweets" (plural). If you want singular, as in only the most recent Tweet, I'd change the header to "Latest Tweet" instead. And this one I'll give you for free... Nix on "What'shappening" or even "What's happening" as a section header. Change to "NUTShappening"/NUTS happening instead. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members sbrett Posted January 10, 2012 Members Share Posted January 10, 2012 The section headers don't bother me so much, but I'd change the first word to lowercase and capitalize the first letter of the second word. That's all personal preference though. Good call going with Wordpress--that is always my first recommendation to bands that want to start a new site. We recently switched over as well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members wheresgrant3 Posted January 10, 2012 Author Members Share Posted January 10, 2012 Good stuff... I'm a terrible editor, and not even close as a designer... so this feedback helps alot. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members wheresgrant3 Posted January 10, 2012 Author Members Share Posted January 10, 2012 10 second commentary: And this one I'll give you for free... Nix on "What'shappening" or even "What's happening" as a section header. Change to " NUTShappening"/NUTS happening instead. Nice Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Christhee68 Posted January 10, 2012 Members Share Posted January 10, 2012 Very nice. One little thing that caught my eye was the slideshow on the home page---it had several pictures of gear. Maybe substitute those with pics of the band or of the crowds having a great time at your shows. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members rangefinder Posted January 10, 2012 Members Share Posted January 10, 2012 Overall I think it's very good and professional-looking. I'm not in the mood to nitpick, so I'll leave that to others. That said, one issue I noticed is that individual pages take a LONG time to load for me. Using Safari on a Mac, it was a >10 sec wait. Which might only be me, and there might not be anything you can do about it anyway, but finding a way to make the load speedier or SEEM speedier (e.g. partial display of page at first) might be worth exploring. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Steadfastly Posted January 11, 2012 Members Share Posted January 11, 2012 It looks good to me. Do you have a service that keeps your site at the top of the list when people are searching for bands? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Blackbird 13 Posted January 11, 2012 Members Share Posted January 11, 2012 Way more "pro" looking.. it still seems a bit plain on the top when you get to the page. Not BAD, mind you... just.. not the same level of energy I've seen and heard from your pictures, video, and audio! You guys are a fun band.. I have to wait to see a picture in the rotating headlines, or scroll down to get that message. Maybe spice the logo up a bit more.. or if not that, then some of the links or graphics around it. All in all though, this site is way nicer than the last one, and very user friendly! What more could you really want out of a website? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members sfarfsky Posted January 11, 2012 Members Share Posted January 11, 2012 looks good. I noticed there's no "like us" on fb button. also, no music Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members TheNewSound? Posted January 11, 2012 Members Share Posted January 11, 2012 looks good. I noticed there's no "like us" on fb button. also, no music This. May not seem like a big deal, but direct integration with FB can do a lot. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members wheresgrant3 Posted January 11, 2012 Author Members Share Posted January 11, 2012 looks good. I noticed there's no "like us" on fb button. also, no music True ... no music yet there's more that 40 live videos posted. Which is better. In the day and age when you can post 'live video', does an audio demo really make sense for a night club band? As far as the FB "like us" not sure I understand.... we have a direct link to our FB Group in the Footer of each page: Nuts In A Blender: The Official Facebook Group Also the FB social media links connect direct to our profile page: Nutsin A Blender We have a profile and a group... but our 'page' isn't active. We started one, but people flocked to friend us and things took off from there. So there's no way to 'like us'... the only way to interact is to join the group or friend us... At one point we had all three, but I never found the FB page all that effective. With close to 4000 friends (of which 95% are local) and 2000 members of the group, I'm not sure what having the page would accomplish at this point. I'm curious as to opinions on this. We're not looking to have the website push people to our Facebook page... instead we're looking to use Facebook and Twitter to push people back to our website. For instance I loaded recent picture from a gig linked in a post on Monday and the picture profile had more than 227 hits by the end of the day (I'm using Google Analytics). I want to create the habit of people coming to our website frequently for show info and new picture updates. As clunky as our old site was we were averaging 1200-1600 visits per month with a 70% returning visitors... almost all looking at the media we post. Since we launched this site three weeks ago we're on track to maintain the same. Right now we're not using any SEO to get hirer hits on Google.... although if you google nuts in a blender see what comes up first. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members wheresgrant3 Posted January 11, 2012 Author Members Share Posted January 11, 2012 Way more "pro" looking.. it still seems a bit plain on the top when you get to the page. Not BAD, mind you... just.. not the same level of energy I've seen and heard from your pictures, video, and audio! You guys are a fun band.. I have to wait to see a picture in the rotating headlines, or scroll down to get that message. Maybe spice the logo up a bit more.. or if not that, then some of the links or graphics around it.All in all though, this site is way nicer than the last one, and very user friendly! What more could you really want out of a website? No it's true. There are certain limitations when using a template design from Word Press.. It want to definitely spice that up a bit without taking away from the navigaton or overall feel to the site. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members tucktronix Posted January 11, 2012 Members Share Posted January 11, 2012 I really like the page, Grant.. very easy to navigate and very professional-looking as others have pointed out. The only thing that I may suggest is maybe doing something a little more with the links on the upper right hand corner of the page. Perhaps, the text could match the font used on the rest of the page and maybe, as Kmart pointed out, nixing the "Happy New Year...". Other than that, I wouldn't tweak it any further. Great job!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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