My new site!

Hi everyone,

If anyone is interested, my new website is up! Black Balloons Music - Home

Here you will find my bio, works, contact, and upcoming events. It's still in the early stages...I hope to get my own domain soon. In the meantime, this is what I have.

Hope you like! Let me know if there are any broken links or anything...

Looks great. Clean and easy to navigate.

My only criticism is that your main graphic takes up a lot of real estate. Every page starts halfway down because of it.... *shrug*

The fuzzy music graphic got really annoying after a while.

Also, consider changing the title to your actual name.

Yeah, on lower resolutions, the page start about 5/6 of the way down... maybe some javascript or flash could clean it up?

Other than that, it's templated, but very clean and accessible

I find it interesting how other people set up their websites...

I'm using a 23" screen, so that's not a problem for me :P - but yeah. You could consider making the picture semi-transparent and putting it in the background and putting parts of the content above it. As long as you make it light enough and the text colour dark enough, it should be easily readable. (Yes, I know it's technically already a background image - you know what I mean!) It might also help to get a bit away from the very CSS-typical blocky style (not that there's anything wrong with that in principle though).

I agree with Justin that I'd rather use your real name than "Black Balloons" - or strictly use "Black Balloons" as an artist name and leave away your real name in the logo. But like it is, it seems to have two main titles: "Black Balloons Music" and "music.of.thomas.feng". I'd decide on one.

Otherwise, I like it. It's clear and informative, and everything can be found where you expect it to be found.

Thanks everyone for their VERY helpful comments! I made a bunch of changes; the banner is now gone, for one...plus I changed the name (and url, lol) of the site:

thomasfeng.weebly.com

And yes, it is all template-based. :)

Nobody wants to read "what I like" and "what I don't like" with ten thousand million items each. In fact, nobody WILL read them. That stuff belongs on social networking sites, not your personal website. Why do your headers highlight? I can't click on them. Like "Professional Biography" and such. If you can't click them, don't make them highlight onmouseover.

Set up your Upcoming Events with headers. 2009 is already big, but make the months big too. Events regular size, months bigger, years biggest.

"Young Composers: If you're young and a composer, join this forum."

No. Just... no. Please read: Young Composers:About

Instead say something like "people of all ages that are new to composition" or whatnot.

Also... have the comments on the Guestbook already open without having to click "comments". I saw "6 comments" and got confused when I didn't see any below... then I clicked. Webdesign is an art of making everything as simple to navigate as humanly possible - you attract more people that way.

Other than those critiques, the site looks pretty nice. Layout is fine, everything is altogether readable. As always, white text on a dark background isn't THE best idea, but like I said, it's pretty readable in this case. Better than my own site ... I'm too lazy to change all my graphics to a better colour selection.

Oh right... and shame on you for using templates! :angry: :P