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Programming Critique Required


Question

The title may be a bit misleading, as I'm not showing any coding just a pre-warning ;).

I was wondering if people could comment and rate the functionality and usability of my site.

Radio 1 Now

Basically, the site gives the user quite a large amount of information on the song and artist of the artist currently playing on BBC Radio 1, 2, 4 & 1XTRA as well as the song currently playing.

It also provides interaction with other websites such as last.fm & youtube.

THe main USP of this site, as well as the above features, is the list/record of every song played on Radio 1/2/4/1XTRA since 2005ish.

So I was wondering if you could help me out and comment? Not so much on the design however since i suck at designing - thus why I didnt put it in the title ;)

EDIT: Link : http://www.radio1now.co.cc

Tim

Oh, and did I mention its officially supported by BBC's backstage division O.o.

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Few things you could do -

1. Hire a web-designer to get a unique, modern design that is similar radio's 1's. Helps show the relationship between the 2 services.

2. Tidy up the interface a bit.

3. Get a *proper* domain (co.uk in this case).

4. Get feedback, and improve the site regularly, once the site gets going, don't do huge cosmetic / backend changes, those should only happen once a year or so, but backend tweaks and bug fixing should happen as and when you find them.

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- You don't deal with browsers with javascript disabled (or in my case NoScript).

- Your website panes shouldn't be a solid white on top of the blue background, perhaps change the text colour to white and remove them, or make them slightly transparent.

- http://www.radio1now.co.cc/?pg=how shouldn't have a raw URL there. Its best to hide them from users so they don't get confused, change it to be: <a href="...">Click here to get the feed</a> or something

- The how does it work page is probably irrelevant, users wont care (even if devs might find it interesting - they could just inspect the code)

- On wide screens you waste a lot of screen real estate by having it fixed width, but this probably isn't a problem at the moment

- You might want to consider search engine friendly URLs, for instance look at how neowin formats their url. You have lots of "?pg=blah" this could just be "/blah/"

- As for searching your songsdb you need to get rid of the complicated options, you should just have one text box for input for Artist, DJ, Title and perhaps another for a Human Readable Date input (not a timestamp). If I type in "Inner City Life Goldie" then I would want the first result you currently have showing to turn up.

- On the register page I'm always told there has been an error (I just loaded it, I didn't try to register)

- The big grey bar with red text is very distracting, either don't display it or change how it is displayed

Finally a few points to hammer in:

- Trust nothing you get from the user. When you are giving data to the database ALWAYS escape it.

- ALWAYS store passwords in the database as values hashed with a salt, MD5 is old and vulnerable use SHA1 or one of the SHA2 functions.

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MS Pandya-

Well it's suppose to be irritating - you use IE - get a proper browser ;).

Lant-

How do you know Im using md5? :/

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MS Pandya-

Well it's suppose to be irritating - you use IE - get a proper browser ;).

That IE popup just looks cheap.

Its not like your site design is doing anything amazing... design wise that IE cant handle.

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MS Pandya-

Well it's suppose to be irritating - you use IE - get a proper browser ;).

Lant-

How do you know Im using md5? :/

I'd understand a subtle message towards IE 6 users telling them to get a modern browser.

IE 8 (and the upcoming IE 9) on the other hand is a proper browser with a steadily increasing market share. Ah well, your loss if you want to alienate > 30% of your potential visitors.

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If you are going to inform users of a certain browser atleast make it less annoying. I would put a bar up top with a close button. I am guessing you are trying to inform and not annoy users and I hope I am right.

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Well it's suppose to be irritating - you use IE - get a proper browser ;).

No one is going to stop using IE to access your site. No one. Not a single person. You are locking out a large percentage of potential users for no good reason, and you are giving your site a bad reputation. You have to ask yourself whether your goal is to push an ideology, or design a site. If the actual problem is technical--that you can't get it to work in IE, then well, it would be better to learn how to make it work.

Apart from that, here's some comments

* I don't think the color scheme really works.

* No stylized logo.

* The login/password fields are not styled.

* There is a weird spinny refresh thing randomly placed near the top middle, and the edges of the graphic itself looks ugly. You need one with proper alpha transparency.

* The background of the selected page link is ugly. A gray square?

* The font, color and underlining of those links also looks a bit out of place.

* The "you are here" thing should be redundant. If you need both that and the page links at the top, the site is too complicated.

2ujiniu.png

* The headers (Currently Playing, Scrobble, etc) look weird. The font is too large, and the color doesn't work with the backgrounds.

* The headers seem like they are part of boxes, yet there are no boxes. They're just randomly placed above things. They don't even line up with the content below them.

* The information bar has to go completely. You can put that as note in plain text somewhere else.

* The picture of the DJ is on top of other content.

* There is a random play button in the middle, yet clicking it doesn't play anything, it just takes you to the home page of the current show.

* The line below that shows the description of the show has an unreadable contrast, and is again randomly placed instead of inside a clearly defined box. There's no grouping of related content. The text is also truncated, which seems weird for a site that seems dedicated to provide this kind of information.

* The last.fm, YouTube, etc buttons in the biography area don't blend properly with the background. The blue heart doesn't do anything. If it's supposed to be only for members, it should be hidden for non-members. It also has a strange color. Turqouisy blue is not a color associated with favorites.

* The three boxes at the bottom have different heights, not enough padding, and the spacing between them is not consistent.

* The "designed for Firefox 3" has to go.

* I would consider extending the information shown to include album art and information about the current track, and not just the biography.

* The page is too wide. You should be careful with fixed widths, and if it's absolutely necessary, it's still too wide. If I have it filling half of my 1920x display, I shouldn't have to scroll horizontally (this is a problem with Neowin too.)

* There appears to be no actual way to listen to the channels from within the site.

If I was going to suggest somewhere to start, it would be with the bar in the picture above.

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