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 Our first recipient of the Best Band Web Site Award is presented to the Brandon Valley High School Band of Brandon, South Dakota as directed by Mr. Robert Goheen, Kevin Kessler, and Bruce Wildes. The Brandon Valley Webmaster is Charlie Henson.
Brandon Valley has done a great job of putting out the information
that students and parents most often are searching for when they go to
their local band web site. The information is easy to navigate and
seems to be regularly updated. Great job to the web crew at Brandon
Valley!
To help other band web sites improve on their own site
designs here are some comments about the things that helped Brandon
Valley earn the award for July 2006.
{mosimage}Visual Comments:
The
site has a nice theme to it that is fairly consistent throughout the
site. Plain old black and red can get boring, but the web master has
done a nice job of varying the layout of each page just enough to keep
it interesting without destroying the continuity of the design. At the
same time the front page logo has been carried over to the interior
pages, binding the site together. The javascript rollovers in a piano
style layout are effective and draw the eye into the page. One minor
suggestion would be to consider making the text visible in a faded
color without having to mouse over the keys. It actually took me a
minute to realize that this was a navigation menu until I accidentally
moused over the keyboard and saw the links pop up.
The individual
pages of the site are well written and updated frequently. The home
page is done with a fixed page width, however as you navigate to other
pages the text fills the entire screen from edge to edge and breaks
that nice feel we got from the home page. This leads to a suggestion
to web masters to try to use a fixed page width for all of your pages.
780 pixels wide is about standard these days for page width.
Technical Comments:
The
Brandon Valley High School Band Web Site shows many of the tenets of
good web site design. The home page is clean with nice contrast
between the red and black colors. The total home page size is very
small, coming in at under 40K! This is very hard to do these days and
still produce a nice looking page. But small size has its benefits. A
home user on a dial-up modem will only have to wait a few seconds for
this entire page to load. The images on the site are well optimized.
They have been trimmed down to their display size with an editing
program rather than by loading a large image and forcing the browser to
resize it.
Kudos to the Brandon Valley High School Band for publishing such a well written site!
Do you think your band web site has what it takes to win the Best Band Web Site Design Award? If you do, drop a line to
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with your web site name and an email address for the web master. For
complete details about the Best Band Web Site Design Award please visit our information page .
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