Hey whats up everyone. I just finished and launched a website for my band deep. I am looking for some opinions and suggestions on how I could improve my site. I am open to anyone's ideas. You can check us out at http://www.deepworldwide.com

Its pretty cool, the top header takes forever to download on 56k, and im guessing your not aimed at the skater/punk market but instead at the loungemusic sort of market.

The site is designed nicely with everything relatively available.
The motion blurs on mouseover are slightly too much, makes me feel slightly queasy.

Pity im on the other side of the world, cos I play bass a lot. Trained in Jazz bass too :)

I agree about the mouseovers. The header loaded fine here though, and I'm on 56k too. I don't like the lense flares though. The site is layed out nicely but I have a few suggestions.

Choose a light color for the main text. Grey against black is not the best choice. While I can read it fine, a lot of people won't be able to. You'll want to create a lot of contrast between the background and foreground. Same with the main section links. They need to stand out a bit more. Try taking them out from the graphic header and placing them below in another table row. They will stand out a lot more against the black background. Lastly, try repeating the blue header color in the header for each news post (Live Appearances, etc)

You'll find you have a more visually pleasing site if you implement those simple adjustments. Hope this helps you out.

Thanks alot for the comments takai. Im glad you like it. I know what you mean about the motion blur, haha, but I used it anyways to give the impression the text was moving, anything less didnt really cut it. I actually have a 56k modem and have not really had any problems with the download time of the header but if I hear more people tell me its taking awhile, I can always go back and re-optimize the images. Anyways, thanks again.

I agree with some of your suggestions. I'll go back and try to implement some of those ideas and see what I can come up with. Thanks for taking the time to help me out, I appreciate it deep_thought.

No problem :)

Welcome to the board. :)

Well deep_thought and takai have pretty much summed up my thoughts. I think its a fairly tight design in an organizational way, as you are usually safe with the format you chose.

The only suggestion I can add at this time is: can you change the 'vote' button to an image? Design it to fit in wit the theme of the site and it will add that extra touch of polish. :)

Cheers.

Will do. Thanks alot steeldolphin.

That's it! I knew I forgot to mention something. That was bugging me. Thanks Chris, ;P

I liked the site very much. It was easy to navigate and informative. I'm a surfer, not a designer...so my opion comes from a different point of view. I liked the blur effect of the mouse overs, it was something different that I hadn't seen before (at least to my recolection). The text color wasn't a problem, but I did find it a bit small. The "news" and "forum" links at the bottom of the page gave me 404 any time I clicked on them, even after reloading the page.

What cityscape did you use for the header?

From memory thats a cityscape from Blade Runner.

First 5 minutes i think.

Looking good so far, aside from some of the stuff mentioned.

Thanks for the comments. The skyline I used is actually the philadelphia skyline. I used it because, well....were from philly, haha. As far as the layout and all, I was definatley going for more of a content and community type of page where the user can not only learn about my band, but a ton of other ones as well. I am such a huge supporter of the music scene and just want to get people recognized. I have links to a couple of design and art related sites too, and I plan on adding more, probably even steel dolphin, which I love. As a matter of fact, if any of you have a site you would like me to link, e-mail me at rgavetti@deepworldwide.com and I'll review it, and if I like it, I'll post it and mention it in my news section also. Anyways I am glad you like it, and I will fix those links immediatley, thanks for letting me know.

I like it a lot. The only things I would say is to maybe put some more space between your text and the border you have and also optimize your graphics a bit better. But you know that if I am talking about optimization instead of more obvious blunders your site it high quality.