Small Favor Please

[saint]

I have discovered the joys of WCMS ( web content management systems ). Gone are the days of slaving away over HTML for years I am working on a station website and would like to get some feed back on it.

 

http://www.scenicradio.com/test/

 

Give me the low down and don't hold back.

 

Your comments and criticisms are greatly appreciated.

[billh]

Just my thoughts,

 

 

1: The gray outside edge needs to be a different color maybe the same blue as the menu bar or have some type of design.

 

 

2: You should put a player on the same page as the chat room. That way people can chat and listen at the same time.

 

 

Other than that it looks good, to me.

[Arfa B]

Coming from a complete dumbo as far as web design goes- it looks fine, but, to me- dull!

Easily forgettable, but functional!

[galaxymatt]

I would avoid the flash chat and go for a more simple shoutbox , I have mine in a pop up window with the player so people can leave the site and carry on with their business.

 

Also you have quite a few pages with very little content, I would consider consolidating them into 1 or 2 pages. Adding the news content to your site instead of just linking to other sites will increase search engine results , so you could use an rss feed to automatically insert news content into your site or add a news category and add your own news posts.

 

Your sidebar is a little empty so you could use that space to add a facbook like box or twitter feed or other social links, maybe an advertisement for one of your shows. Your logo should be in the header of the site instead of the text.

 

Welcome to the world of CMS and goodbye to the world of html pages (i'd never go back), I don't know which CMS you've chosen but wordpress is my first choice.

 

It's also worth noting that you don't need to use a CMS to get away from the html pages , you can use php files and use the basic php include function to link sections of the site together so you don't have to update every page when you change something. You should also use CSS and link to a stylesheet rather than include the css in each page individually.

[Vanlen]

I think you are still working on it as when I went to take a peak it was slow loading and pics missing. I'll check again later. The Get Simple CMS you are using is quite interesting and one of the newer ones on the block.

 

Cheers

[saint]

Thank you for all the comments - i appreciate the honest feedback !

I have added - subtracted - multiplied and divided over the course of the holiday season and created version two - the final !

 

www.elmeromeroradio.com

 

And

 

The Get Simple ( CMS ) Web Content Management System is by far the easiest and fully functional software out for n00b users.

[saint]

P.S. - I know the banners goofy - i had to put something there as a place holder - until a real artist could make one.

[GKIye]

Hello Saint,

 

Merry XMas my friend ...

 

If you need some ideas to make a banner ... make a google search for images with subject "mero mero"

You gonna be surprised of what you gonna see

Making a search for "mero" only gives even "nicer" results ... lol

By the way "mero mero radio" means in English "very simple radio"

 

I guess Bill gonna be able to create a banner with some of those pictures

 

a small example of the images :

[cr08]

I'm also a big fan of the Wordpress platform for this type of work and am in the middle of building my station's site off it. Good for content focus more than user focus which seems to be the aim for most other CMSes IMHO (ie: Joomla, xNuke, Drupal). And after playing around with it for a while, it becomes pretty easy to tweak to make it a perfect fit. And best of all: Doesn't require total rewrites to add new stuff like basic HTML.

 

Biggest catch now though is getting SAM's web stuff integrated. I know of Festerhead's stuff, but now that he is out of the business it is likely going to be quickly out of date. That and the installation and configuration is quite involved.

[chophouse]

I'm putting together a site with WordPress and also using SAM. My most immediate concern is to put in a pop-up player that works for both Windows and Apple without the user having to download anything - just hit listen and it starts playing the stream. Would you have any suggestions for something like that?

 

I'm using a Shoutcast v1 streaming server through SpacialNet, fed by SAM 4.9.6 on a MySQL 5.5.23 db.

 

I'm a bit hindered because I hired out the web piece and the guy doesn't know players.