Thread: I am up and running!

I am very happy to have a site up and running so quickly! Ok, I know
some of you are going to say it's 'hokey', but that's ok. I am only
providing information to a small local group here in South Alabama, usa.
The site has music and pictures and may load slowly on some computers.
As I add content, I will either resize to smaller pics, or extend to page 2.
I am using jpeg for pics, mp3 for audio.

I enjoy all the comments on the 'Forum'. They are helpful, even if they
address other sites. The learning process on Voda is an enjoyable
experience!

lovethatbluegrassmusic
www.baldwincomusic.com
Brad.

Not to sure what went wrong. But the site repeatedly asked for active control & lock up my browser. (Using MS explorer)

Chris.

wow have you ever been busy - your home page does load very slow and i'm on broadband. you might want to make a couple of pages out of your home page - separate some of the information like the local events section. make things easier to find . also put navigation buttons listing important pages like "home" "bluegrass fest" etc. on your other pages so it is easier to get around. love bluegrass - we spent a couple of weeks in Beanblossom last summer - had a great time. we arent musicians just converts asirimarco
www.movingon1.com

Brad,
Wow you have done a lot of work. Your site was interesting with lots of information. It did take a long time to load, I am also on broadband. It is a good thing a good portion of the site shows up fast or I might have left before viewing. I did get the music clip to work right away. Your links also worked. You might want to consider organizing your navigation buttons a bit differently they seemed kind of scattered. If you change the background on two of your nav buttons that have a white square around them to match your page background they will blend better. The sound did not work on the guitar sound buttons.
All in all a nice site that I can tell you put a lot of time and effort in.

hmmm... A very very nice site, lots of hard work gone into that well done. However, as above.. I had to close it down as it froze everything up on me? You may put people off there, you might want to relook at that.

Sorry to be negative, but otherwise I was impressed Honest!
Ramsey

Thank you all for your responses! I will try to slim down the
home page somewhat and push the events list to page 2.
Perhaps even move the pics to another page also. The
tone bars work on the local preview, and sometimes when
I re-publish, they begin working. But, as you said, they
also some times lock up. I will get to work on that one,
and at least put it on another page now that I have learned
how to create pages. T-h-a-n-k-s!

Very nice and not at all 'hokey'. Agree with comments above and if I may suggest when all is tweaked ....to have samples of music ...which you might have but I was getting frozen out. If you haven't already...use the pix resizer to resize your pictures and that should helpa bit. Great job and it's nice to see local musicians doing their 'thang'. Also I loved the pictures of musical instruments..very nice touch.

Whoa !
8 Active X requests at the same time and then your page locked. HAd to force a shut down.

Flippin blimey! I dont know what you have on your site but I cant even view it, everytime I try it freezes my screen and I have to Reboot ....talk about giving someone the cold shoulder lol

For my money it loads too slow.
Could be the wood background, if it's an image they are normally large.
Tried it on my site with bricks and it weighed in at around 1 mb, which is way too large.
Look at your optimisation!

The background is a typical "Tile" that is *******ted, not a solid image.(meaning it is OK...)
You DO however have multiple wav/mpg files loaded onto a single page, and more than 25 images, all which need resizing and file adjusting....unnecessary load strain....

Secondly, your RealPlayer is not properly configured, and chews up bandwidth trying to reset multiple times (in some visitors browsers, this translates as slow load as it looks to cache your page).

The suggestions to make your pages smaller (content-wise) and maybe more tightly "organized" would serve you and your visitor's experience much better.

(and, unless you are completely committed to it, lose the "hit counter" - it too eats up functional load and is a useless utility)

The active x control messages may have been coming from the media player control I was using. I changed that so that now, just click on
a pic and the mp3 will download and use the users player. Hope that
cleared it up!

Brad.

well, here I go again whining....but i feel it is important to speak for all the people living in the dial-up darkages with me....I SOO want to see your site as I love the subject...but after more than a week and several attempts each day...I'm so discouraged....today there were 3 active x boxes (better than the other day, though) and every minute I had to refresh and STILL got red x and just a little bit of your page actually loaded. After 4 refreshes, i just give up.

I'm not saying any of this to make you feel bad or to be mean...I know I'm in the stone ages.......i HATE to post negative things...but I just thought you would want to know from a different perspective.

Please think of your target audience....if they all have high speed connections, then my rambling is pointless. But if there is any chance that even half of them are on dial up...???

Is there any way you could separate your site into smaller pages?

Ok, sorry for my whining. I'm sure you have a wonderful site and I would love to hear your music someday!! At least I got to see your picture and your group's picture at the top of the page! Looks like a fun group! I will try and view it again in the future!

Maybe i better get satellite.

Thank you again for the response to my review. I am in the process
of thinning down the pages as I have already done to the home page.
I have added pages too, but I am trying to keep them neat.

I plan on putting all the pictures on the 'showcase' page into some
form of gallery folder, when I find what I'm looking for.

As for dial-up users; ok, let me whine! I don't believe anyone today
should be using dial-up! Ok, that said, I can report that most users
in my area are on DSL which is just slightly more cost than dial-up,
so due to successfull marketing by the phone company, dsl is gaining
usage here. Lots of folks, like myself, are also on cable. Cable is
only about ten dollars more than dsl.

I'm not sure if the active x problem has been solved. Most computers
I access have no problem with the pages. However, I do have one
here that does get the control errors on one page (music notes).
I might need someone more savy that I to help solve that issue.

I am getting comments from local users, all positive.
The site is growing in content. I do need an album to load pictures into
but I need lots of room for descriptions. I'm looking in to that now.

My wife says I don't pay her any attention now that I have this site up!
So, There is only so much time in the evening to work on it!

Giving her a 'recipes' page has helped greatly!!

Thanks again and sorry for the faults!

Either the above mentioned issues have all been resolved, or my broadband connection is the greatest thing since sliced bread! I opened it up and it took no more than 5-7 sec to load the entire page. If this is the norm for slow pages then I guess it's slow. Otherwise, if you are able to get fastaccess DSL from bellsouth I suggest you do (assuming you're in Florida) that's what I have.
There are some things I would change. I went through all the advertising ads on the bottom of your home page and some will open a new page while others don't. Make sure they all open in new windows so that people aren't steered away from your site. I really like that there is a site that actually helps to tune an instrument. Very informative and helpful. I don't think it's hokey at all. As a matter of fact I think it's a very nice site.

Thankyou for checking things out for me. I havn't paid
much attention to the adds to be perfectly honest!
I'll have to check those out today.

I finally found out why some computers were getting
'active x' errors. It seems that you need 'Realplayer'
to play the mp3 sounds properly. I downloaded that
on this computer and now the errors have gone.

I had intended to have the site mostly bluegrass, but
the folks at church wanted to be included! So, I added
a page for them! Of course, I also had to add a page
for my wife to play with!

Originally Posted by islandcrazy

well, here I go again whining....but i feel it is important to speak for all the people living in the dial-up darkages with me....I SOO want to see your site as I love the subject...but after more than a week and several attempts each day...I'm so discouraged....today there were 3 active x boxes (better than the other day, though) and every minute I had to refresh and STILL got red x and just a little bit of your page actually loaded. After 4 refreshes, i just give up.

I'm not saying any of this to make you feel bad or to be mean...I know I'm in the stone ages.......i HATE to post negative things...but I just thought you would want to know from a different perspective.

Please think of your target audience....if they all have high speed connections, then my rambling is pointless. But if there is any chance that even half of them are on dial up...???

Is there any way you could separate your site into smaller pages?

Ok, sorry for my whining. I'm sure you have a wonderful site and I would love to hear your music someday!! At least I got to see your picture and your group's picture at the top of the page! Looks like a fun group! I will try and view it again in the future!

Maybe i better get satellite.

Hey Island! I have made some improvements on my site
www.baldwincomusic.com if you want to check it out.
I was wondering if you have looked into going wireless
in your area? WIFI is growing in popularity all over the
world. Dial up, as you know, is about 56kbps, wifi wireless
is around 10 to 100 mbps. So, even areas where dsl or
cable might not be the right choice, wifi could be an
alternative with speed and economy. One other thing,
seems that Realplayer is needed to remove the
control page errors. It is free at:
www.download.com/realplayer/3000-2139_4-10255189.html

Way Better, Brad! Thanks! YOu went from over 64 items to load on the first page to half of that.

Just so you know, millions of people are on dial up not by choice, but because other services are not available in their area.

Good luck on your music! It is delightful!