Drummers in Web Design

Eric

Senior Member
I've talked to many drummers on this site, Bermuda among them, who, like me, are involved in some way with the art and/or business of web design. I figured it was time to start a thread where we could talk shop, post sites, whatever. I, uh, don't have anything to offer at the moment, but I will come back when I do to keep this post active. Cool?
 
I've took Web Design class last semester, can't see myself making a career out of it, but it was interesting and enlightening.
 
I'm the webmaster for my band's web site. The design is not mine, but I've designed quite a few sites during the last 15 years. My day job is as a programmer, and I work with both web and Windows applications.
 
Been webmastering since the Mosaic browser(!). My personal rules are to keep the coding efficient (hand coding core of pages), the three click rule, and do not go for style over substance. Sure some of my sites might look 'dated' compared to those that employ flash and other technologies, yet desired data is extremely easy to find and they reach the targeted audience while delivering information in a fast and timely manner.

As an example, the below site is around 5000 web pages and employs the 'divide and conquer' technique plus a search engine:

www.EnjoyTheMusic.com

She aint 'pretty', yet she works, loads fast and you can quickly find information on the site (if it is there to be found of course as no site has everything). Color me Mr. Old School...
 
I dislike webpages with un-necessary flash images. That is why I use the flashblock addon for Firefox. I admire that you stay away from them.
 
I dabbled in web design for a few years and at first it was this new toy. Oh wow! You can incorporate prose, music, design and artwork together! Wow - look at all these cool Javascripts and Jave applets - wheeeeeee! Then the penny dropped. I guess it's a rite of passage.

However, once all the backend SQL databasing and CSS took over I was left behind. I made a few barter simple sites for friends who were sole traders and non-profit organisations. Then I shifted to digital art and cartooning.

I've been neglecting my cartooning since being bitten by the music bug (again) but, like Arnie, I'll be back :)

http://www.sangrea.net/free-cartoons
 
Well, since we are peddling our web wares: I showcase my sick sense of humor and general loathing of cute Japanese cartoon/merchandising characters in my webcomic, which is called "Goodbye Kitty":

http://www.gbk-sayonara.thecomicseries.com

Fittingly enough, this week is "Dead Rock Stars" week, and Bonzo and Keith will be highlighted.

It's also available on Facebook and RSS. Enjoy!
 
I've also avoided gratuitous graphics and Flash, and still design as if everyone's on dial-up. Consequently, my sites run very fast for those with high-speed access.

I've been writing code since 1995, and still do all of my sites in Notepad.

Hey, I'd rather be a coder than a codger.

Bermuda
 
I do all my code manually too, but Notepad? I prefer to at least use an editor that was designed to code in, with a bit of syntax highlighting and auto-indenting.
 
Nice 'toons! Thanks for sharing.

Thanks thtst. You can tell when I started getting more serious with music because my cartoon output went waaay down in both quantity and quality. Most of the toons since May have been pretty ordinary. I had a friend (died of cancer in Jan this year) who was a coder and he used to make sites like that - basic to look at but super-useful.

Ah Naige, the spooky look. One of my old bands made a spooky poster with everyone pulling scary heads at the camera. I expect there were a few laughs while doing the shoot and looking at the output.

Al, Goodbye Kitty is pretty cool. Always good to meet people who are more deranged than me :)

Bermuda, I visited your site earlier and like that clean design approach. I enjoyed your audio samples.

I think the nicest site I made, design-wise, was for a photographer friend. Since he and his partner (also a friend) started their breeding program he's been too involved with being Mr Mum and home construction work to do much snapping so the site hasn't been updated for ages: http://www.sharpphotos.com.au/

Notepad? OMG no. I prefer to use a WYSIWYG editor and clean up the code.
 
I've also avoided gratuitous graphics and Flash, and still design as if everyone's on dial-up. Consequently, my sites run very fast for those with high-speed access.
I've been writing code since 1995, and still do all of my sites in Notepad.
Hey, I'd rather be a coder than a codger.
Bermuda

big_bowdown.gif
 
Wow, it's cool to see this thread take off so quickly. But man, ain't no-one got love for flash? Y'all talkin' like it's the double-bass drum pedal of web-design!

I think any new technology takes time to be implemented tastefully, wisely, unobtrusively, etc. I'm designing my new site as a full-flash site for one reason: the mp3 player. I don't like the available options for using mp3's on html sites. Many have just an audio page, but you have to STAY on that page to listen to the music. (I have a singer friend who has her mp3 player on every page-every time you open a new page, it reloads and starts over from the first song! not good.) Most people have short attention spans, they want to navigate around your site while listening. You could use javascript for a pop-out window, but I find that unattractive. I think you could also use frames, but I don't have much experience with that, I'm not sure how well that works. I know the drawbacks of flash sites- large file sizes, tricky to SEO, but I think with a little effort, I can work around these. I'll post my site when I finish, of course. Thoughts?
 
I do all my code manually too, but Notepad? I prefer to at least use an editor that was designed to code in, with a bit of syntax highlighting and auto-indenting.

Seriously, I write every < and br and href and table from scratch. Notepad is perfect, I don't want highlights, I can immediately see the structure in a page source (I've been coding since 1995, so it's second nature to me.)

Bermuda
 
Wow, it's cool to see this thread take off so quickly. But man, ain't no-one got love for flash? Y'all talkin' like it's the double-bass drum pedal of web-design!

I think any new technology takes time to be implemented tastefully, wisely, unobtrusively, etc. I'm designing my new site as a full-flash site for one reason: the mp3 player. I don't like the available options for using mp3's on html sites. Many have just an audio page, but you have to STAY on that page to listen to the music. (I have a singer friend who has her mp3 player on every page-every time you open a new page, it reloads and starts over from the first song! not good.) Most people have short attention spans, they want to navigate around your site while listening. You could use javascript for a pop-out window, but I find that unattractive. I think you could also use frames, but I don't have much experience with that, I'm not sure how well that works. I know the drawbacks of flash sites- large file sizes, tricky to SEO, but I think with a little effort, I can work around these. I'll post my site when I finish, of course. Thoughts?

Yeah, our singer is a web designer and more and more of his clients are wanting Flash content. Like it or not, but in some circles where making an impression or creating a cool image is important Flash sites are considered more professional. Personally, I get bored waiting for page loads just to watch some "cool" effects before I can start finding content. It's also annoying if you like something and can't cut and paste.

I've done snippets of Flash on sites but they're always small and fast-loading.

Reverbnation and Wolfgang's Vault both have mini popup MP3 players, which IMO is a fairly elegant solution, but it can create a tangle with browser settings that block popups.

In the old days the word was that frames are evil :) Not sure if ppl still think like that(?). Frames can be simulated with CSS and the <div> tag too. Another option would be having a page with MP3 links set in an inline frame and called by each page.
 
Wow, it's cool to see this thread take off so quickly. But man, ain't no-one got love for flash? Y'all talkin' like it's the double-bass drum pedal of web-design!

I think any new technology takes time to be implemented tastefully, wisely, unobtrusively, etc. I'm designing my new site as a full-flash site for one reason: the mp3 player. I don't like the available options for using mp3's on html sites. Many have just an audio page, but you have to STAY on that page to listen to the music. (I have a singer friend who has her mp3 player on every page-every time you open a new page, it reloads and starts over from the first song! not good.) Most people have short attention spans, they want to navigate around your site while listening. You could use javascript for a pop-out window, but I find that unattractive. I think you could also use frames, but I don't have much experience with that, I'm not sure how well that works. I know the drawbacks of flash sites- large file sizes, tricky to SEO, but I think with a little effort, I can work around these. I'll post my site when I finish, of course. Thoughts?

If it isn't broke........don't fix it !

But yeah...flash is a pain. Not only am I still on a dial-up connection, i'm also still using ME version of windows. Flash locks up all the time. Even jpg's over 100kb load way too slow. Bigger isn't always better, and technology can hinder creativity.
 
If it isn't broke........don't fix it !

But yeah...flash is a pain. Not only am I still on a dial-up connection, i'm also still using ME version of windows. Flash locks up all the time. Even jpg's over 100kb load way too slow. Bigger isn't always better, and technology can hinder creativity.

I think cutting edge stuff is fun, but in the real world, it tends to isolate access and is very elitist on the part of the designer. Someday, what's cutting edge now will be the norm... and then perhaps obsolete. But at any given time, it's always a good idea to stay behind the curve for the most universal access. Nobody likes to be forced to load special plug-ins and apps to in order see someone's latest file.

I learned that lesson when I started using frames. They were a fairly new attribute, but only the absolute latest browsers could read them. Of course, I had the latest browser - Netscape 2.0 I believe - so I could see them just fine and used them on Al's site. But at a post-production house one day, I had them visit Al's site to see a particular image, and lo and behold, the site wouldn't display! Who would think that a cutting-edge video facility wouldn't have the latest browser on the computers? Well, they didn't, I was embarrassed, and re-coded the site that evening.

As for image and content size, those have expanded to fit high-speed access, so the resulting pages are essentially as slow as lesser content is with dial-up. Little was accomplished. But with high-speed, and conservative files and content, those sites are viewed as extremely fast , and that's good.

But still using ME? Oh my... I knew that was a permanent problem when I struggled with it for a month or two. I went 'back' to 98se and stayed happy for many more years. My experiences with Vista have kept me from moving to it (I run XP with great success) and I'll give "7" a nod when it comes out in a few weeks.

Bermuda
 
I really agree with the philosophy to make things accessible to everyone. And it definitely does have an elitist aire about the next new gadget that comes out every few months.

Like the mp3 players...everyone told me I should get on of those little players, and I could put all my music on it. Well I have 65gig of mp3s on my external drive, and I still haven't transferred my vinyl or video to digital format.

But anyway...yeah I was able to learn enough to manage my own web-page and apply the proper embedded codes on other sites that offer that type of manipulation. Even though my functions and appearance on my site is somewhat remedial, I was really pleased at how fast it loaded on dial-up. I think the only images that get near 100k are the backgrounds.

I use ME on my e-mail computer. And if I could find the USB drivers for my e-machine, I wouldn't have to run XP on my recording computer. The software processes are only 5-10% slower than XP, but transferring between external drives is 10min per gig instead of 1min. But ME has been very reliable for me, on my Art computer I don't have to worry about XP always changing my page-file and virtual memory when I don't use the scanner that frequently. And when I had XP on the e-mail computer, I would have to re-format the hard-drive about once a month to get all the worms off. And I may be mistaken, but ME doesn't seem to be as prone to get some bug hidden on the motherboard somewhere.

I had a friend that was a software designer; he once told me that everytime he fixed all the glitches in the operating system, Windows would release a new version...and he would have to start all over again.

So yeah...If I could I would just run an old analog board and with 8mm multi-track reel-to-reel for all my recording.
 
..my vinyl... 8mm multi-track reel-to-reel for all my recording.

Cool!

Apologies for OT, what table/arm/cart you spinning? R2R is making a nice comeback in some circles and i know these guys who do stunning refurb work, but just can't seem to find the desire to get back into the whole tape/splicing/looping thing.
 
I do all my code manually too, but Notepad? I prefer to at least use an editor that was designed to code in, with a bit of syntax highlighting and auto-indenting.

Glad to hear you're using this: I plan to keep it much more aggressively up-to-date than has been the case in the past, but don't hesitate to let me know if you find errors or need clarifications.
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