My Newest Creation

**LAMA** · Apr 20, 2004, 18:32

AfterGlow Music
Ok, the main idea here is to get the info to the fan/soon to be fan of my friends website. I was just wondering what you guys think about the site.
Please any of your help is wanted.
Thanks again.

**Vension.com** · Apr 28, 2004, 12:56

Nice site, not really my taste of style - but it is good.

A few things I noticed:
- There seems to be a lot of images (slow loading?)
- The "Shows" section is a little hard on the eyes, maybe try removing or lightening the border; bolding the titles/headlines; Make the info text size smaller; Change the red to a different color or bolding.
- I don't know if you can do something about the pictures, but its annoying when the images look like thumbnails but then aren't 'clickable'.

I hope that helps, in general it is a very nice site graphically.

**kajax101** · Apr 28, 2004, 16:01

Hey looks a pretty nice site, you gonna add any additional content?

**Ricky** · Apr 28, 2004, 16:25

This is a good start, your website has a good look and design.

However, It loads a bit slowly. You can try to fix this by reducing the number of images that loads at the opening of the page...

Besides that, its OK.

**jorasmi** · Apr 28, 2004, 18:17

the background is nice but it make the site heavy.

**LAMA** · Apr 28, 2004, 19:16

yes, more content is underway. The design of the site is supposed to look 'heavy'. I feel that the site loads at a moderate speed. Using biger images would make it just load slower. Or am I wrong?

**DCS** · Apr 28, 2004, 19:47

By heavy I think he means slow to load.

I am on dial-up and it clocked in at just shy of 2 minutes to load.

**deronsizemore** · May 2, 2004, 12:12

I am on dial up as well and all of the sliced images took a while to load. You should try optimizing your images if you havn't already done so. optimizing should help the load time. I don't like the horizontal scroll bar...just my own person taste for websites speaking here, but I just HATE to scroll left and right on a site.

Overall though the design and content of the site are good and I'm sure will even get better when more content is added.

**Cheeser** · May 2, 2004, 13:43

I really like the site layout, but the font on the left doesn't really go well with the heavy, punk (i suppose

) theme. I feel that they look out of place. I also think that the thumbnails should be clickable in the photos section.

Other than that, great site and great job!

**LAMA** · May 2, 2004, 15:38

thanks to all.
deronsizemore tell me where you have to scroll sideways and what resolution are you running.
also can someone tell me about this optimizing, im not fimilar.

**Rackasaur** · May 3, 2004, 09:13

I like the background, very punky and cool - I agree with Cheeser though that you might want to look for some new fonts for the Menu and also you might use a new font to create some page titles for the content area. As well, you might want to make some sort of sub-menu for the photos section when you get around to it - having to scroll through gallery pages without knowing where you are going is not very fun. A funky border for the pictures could also spice it up a bit.

Nice concept, good luck with it !

**Impressions** · May 6, 2004, 11:02

Why did you add the pop-up ads in twice?

**Prosubmit** · May 6, 2004, 17:47

Nice Back Ground. I would try to get a way from framesets. You can realy see it in loading!

**deronsizemore** · May 6, 2004, 20:44

Originally Posted by LAMA

also can someone tell me about this optimizing, im not fimilar.

Hi...

Basically optimizing is making the image size a small as possible without loosing to much of the quality. I'm not sure about other graphics programs, but Photoshop (what I use) has a "save for web" feature so you can optimize all images and even specify how many colors and what colors to use in each image...basically its like I said, you can make the image size smaller and smaller by playing around with how many colors are used in the image all the while you have a preview of what the image looks like optimized...its a cool little feature. I didn't know about it either until I got Photoshop...all of my images were taking forever to load on a site...lol.

How this helps.

-Deron

**eminem** · May 7, 2004, 12:30

I liked the design but found the download time far to long. I am on a dial up connection of 56k and it took 30 seconds to load. I am sure that you can make those images smaller.
I found the navigation easy and you kept a constant design throughout.
The colour scheme goes nicely, although not my taste they match.
More content is needed.
Also i was redirected to a Lycos members page, are you going to buy a domain? I think for the quality of site and the effort you put into it is a must.

Its better than any design for a website i could do. Well done

**Impressions** · May 7, 2004, 13:04

Originally Posted by LAMA

thanks to all.
deronsizemore tell me where you have to scroll sideways and what resolution are you running.
also can someone tell me about this optimizing, im not fimilar.

In addition to another post I noticed that some of your images were just too large in dimension. For example Afterglow1.jpg on your photos page has an actual size of 600x450 with a whopping size of over 700k. But on your site the picture itself is displayed at only a fraction of its original dimensional size, but it is still over 700k in file size.

I went ahead and optimized this image and reduced the dimensions so that you could see the difference. (I did some other image editing to it as well to bring out the image better) The finished picture has a file size of just over 4k.

**DCS** · May 7, 2004, 15:49

specify how many colors and what colors to use in each image

Only for palletted images such as .gifs

A palletted image is one that has a set number of colors to utilize such as the .gif format being 256 colors unlike jpeg which has millions of colors available.

**dahmian** · May 7, 2004, 17:40

Your site is pretty slow, but there are a few tricks you can do to make it faster. I just wanted to add one that will make your site appear to load faster. I think it would help if you also add a background color to your tables that is similar to the background images (in this case grey). Also, you should use alt tags on your images, especially navigational ones, that way people can use your site even before the graphics load.

**daniela** · May 7, 2004, 18:14

Hi,

My favourite part of this design is the the background texture and the torn edges effect. The drawing in the top right hand corner is interesting although it could be positioned better in relation to the background and the "AFTERGLOW" title.

Not sure about the thick grey borders, maybe if the content was formatted differently the borders would appear a bit better; at the moment the content looks too much like it's just been cut and paste into the design.

I think it would be a good idea to lose the tape, it just does'nt look right in this layout.

The site is easy to navigate, which is good, but I think the navigational buttons are too small for the big box around it.

I think his covers everything.

Daniela.

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