I need design advice for my HT website!!! (1 Viewer)

[Bob Kavanaugh]

Alright, my home theater website needs some serious help. I must be the lamest person ever. What are the page load times for those of you who use dial-up? Maybe I should use thumbnail pics on the main page that link to another page with multiple (real) photos of my stuff? Maybe a 360 degree photo (Ipix) of the 'ol screening room? The site just looks like i'm trying to sell my stuff instead of showcase it to other HT enthusiasts. ANY help will be great! Thanks.

Click the link below to see the site.

 

[Carl Johnson]

I have a cable modem and your site is about the most impressive that I've seen. Keep in mind I've seen plenty. That being the case if you want to cater to those using slower connections the home page could open up to a link saying "click here for high speed, here for dialup". The dialup page can be thumbnails but keep high speed as is.

 

[teapot2001]

You should design the site with dial-up users in mind, so yes, I suggest using thumnbails that link to another page. To make the site look better, I suggest decreasing the page length so it doesn't scroll down more than a screen or two, removing the white space, and removing the "New" image. There are lots of other things you could do, but you should be able to figure them out or look at other members' sites for some ideas.

~T

 

[DaveF]

The key weakness is that it's not personal. As you identified, it's currently just a catalog listing of your hardware. We can get that from Crutchfield.com. Tell us about your HT experience.

Some specifi suggestions:

* Have a movie still on your TV, not a calibration DVD. Unless you really do kick back and watch color bars on a Friday night

* Talk about your personal experience with your hardware, rather than listing the specs. We can get the specs from the manufacturers website. But we can only learn why you like these particular items from you.

* Show your viewing area, and not just the catalog photos of individual items.

* Watch graphic sizes and use a download time estimator to keep it modem-friendly.

 

[Bob Kavanaugh]

Great. Thanks for all of your input, it will be handy this weekend as I fix up the ol' site.

Dave, I think you gave me exactly what I was looking for.

 

[Joshua Clinard]

It's a good start. I'd suggest having a seperate page for equipment specs, and another page with pictures of the components in their actual cabinents, and DVD's on the shelf, not in a stack. The page loaded fine for me over 56k, so I wouldn't reccomend making them any smaller. They are small enough as it is.

Good luck!

 

[Bob Kavanaugh]

Thanks Josh. The DVD's are actually on a wire rack, with a stand I made of MDF.

I hope to personalize the site this week and provide a better understanding of why I chose the products I have, and how I built my stands, subs, etc...

 

[Tim Morton]

Another suggestion is to revamp the front page...lose the black background.."so played out"...and get a horizontal picture that fits without having to scroll...also clean up the picture...it needs to be color corrected (unless you have red walls and matching red speakers. Also clean up the cables and lose the play station game. Step back a bit to show some of the room you are in. Then by shrinking the picture nto the first frame you can add some links across the bottom to take people where they want to go. I do like the second page "look" but again like was pointed out it would be best to break that up into multilpe pages and shrink the pictures a bit, and see if you can't lay it out so as not to have so much white space.

it loaded FAST on my cable modem...wicked fast!!!

 

[Bob Kavanaugh]

OK, I made some changes. What do you think?

 

[Neil Joseph]

Site is a good start. If you take a look through the members gallery of HT's you will get a god idea of some of the different styles to our HT sites, or you can click on our signatures in many cases.