Review - www.lyricsh.com

They have: 5,633 posts

Joined: Jan 1970

hello,

I am looking for ways to improve my site, www.lyricsh.com , constructive critiscm is greatly appreciated. Thanks !
RJP

PS - Thanks Travis for showing me this board

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Get your free Lyrics at www.lyricsh.com

Megan's picture

She has: 11,421 posts

Joined: Jun 1999

Nice site! I like that tan colour you've used - it looks nice with the blue and it's not a colour you see very often on the web.

I also like the way you have used white space, although in some areas I think there is a little too much. I would try making the logo bigger and bolder maybe, so it stands out more. The two "sponsors" buttons look kind of lonely in the middle of all that space. (I'm at 1024 x 768 resolution, so this space looks really big for me. I love the way your page expands though - great!)

Oohhh, really nice navigation menu at the bottom - that looks fantastic!

Really, I don't have much criticism for you (and if you've read any of my other posts, you'll know that I generally speak my mind when I do)

Okay - logos on the sub-pages - maybe the blue you've used there should be the same as the blue page border. It also might be a good idea to co-ordinate the logo and graphic effects used on the main pages with the logos on the sub-pages. Maybe put a small version of your main logo on every page....

Excellent Site!

They have: 5,633 posts

Joined: Jan 1970

Nice Site.

Try adding some pictures of artists or something to make the page for fun to look at. Its a little boring right now.

Bye,

Malte

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Malte Ubl - Germany - http://goKewl.com/
The beats of 1000 hearts inside ... the merciless pulsation ... and all I know is I'll be back ... back to trance nation!

They have: 5,633 posts

Joined: Jan 1970

Thanks Meg and Malte, I like your idea Megs and will work on that tonite. However I dont plan on adding pictures of artist because:
1) I have done it before and it has taken up to much space
2) they didnt make the page look any better or fun to look at
3) people want the lyrics, from what they have told me.

Also malte, I went to your site, the color scheme is a bit weird, alot of red, which takes a toll on your eyes after a while, and I can guess why u were not listed with Yahoo, mainly because of the "Bored with Yahoo?" part, then tend not to list Anti yahoo sites.

RJP

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Get your free Lyrics at www.lyricsh.com

They have: 2,390 posts

Joined: Nov 1998

I also feel that this site needs a logo that stands out. Other than that a fairly well layed out site.
JP

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The Webmaster Promotion and Resource Center.
Visit: http://www.what-next.com

They have: 76 posts

Joined: Apr 1999

Ravi,

I'm not good at reviewing sites so I won't, but I have a suggestion. Your site is a prime candidate for using a database. From just looking at your site it looks like you make a seperate page for every lyric, OUCH!

Creating a database might be a bit of work up front but it will save you major time later on. This way you would only have to design one display page that pulls the lyric and artist info from the database.

What happens when you want to change the look of your site? You're going to have to change every page manually. Sure, style sheets can take care of some of that but it's still a pain.

If your host doesn't support databases or you don't want to spend the extra money you can still set up a Javascript array database. Basically it's an external .JS file that holds all the lyric info. You would probably have to split it up by letter since having just one .JS file would probably get to big.

Oops, rambling again Sad

Anyways, it's just a suggestion.

Later,
PJ

They have: 64 posts

Joined: Jul 1999

Overall, nice.

- I don't like the logo... a little bland, doesn't fit in well with the character.

- Your site has way too much whitespace at 1024x768. This is one case where a fixed-resolution design would probably look better; it's nicer to have well laid-out stuff in the middle of the page and the sides blank than to fill the page but leave huge amount of white between everything.

Also, I had a look at your copyright page and have a couple of comments about that. As I'm sure you know, distributing song lyrics to copyrighted songs is illegal. I think it's laughable that that's illegal, and am pissed off at people for enforcing it, but that doesn't change the fact that sooner or later you will probably run into trouble. You say that you are a nonprofit, which is a good thing to say - for image reasons, companies don't like to go after nonprofits. However, you also have paid advertising on your site. It's much better to just be commercial than to claim you're a nonprofit and get revenue from your site.

They have: 5,633 posts

Joined: Jan 1970

Dyc,

That legal issue is a pain, two of the top lyrics sites have been shut down already..
www.lyrics.ch and
www.lyricshq.com
ISL (lyrics.ch) is back up, but the way the lyrics are displayed is crazy, its an applet, that displays half the song then the other half. Then ends with a "This concludes the showing of these lyrics" line. There is no point to the page anymore. To be honest with you, I allowed someone else to advertise on my site, but just yesterday I stopped that. So we werent making any money, and we still havent, I am considering taking the sponsors of all together, I havent decided yet thou.

I dont have much time to work on the site because of my summer job, I will see what I can do with the images thou, I'm not the best at creating them.

RJP

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Get your Lyrics at:
[url] www.lyricsh.com[/url]

They have: 5,633 posts

Joined: Jan 1970

Yea, I know what you mean. I dont have a problem finding the lyrics to add to my site. I am going to contact PJ by email and see if he can explain things further. Its seems as though if I can do something like that for my site, it would be easy to add lyrics, I dont edit each html file for the lyrics, they r basically text files.

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Get your Lyrics at:
[url] www.lyricsh.com[/url]

They have: 64 posts

Joined: Jul 1999

Yeah, I know all about lyrics.ch. I used it quite a bit when it still existed in a useful form Sad The applet really is a joke. It either decides to go through the whole song in 20 seconds, or make you wait 5 minutes to scroll through. It also takes a minute to load each song. Oh well... they'll soon figure out that something's wrong when their hits drop by 90%.

They have: 64 posts

Joined: Jul 1999

I can tell you exactly what you want: a relational database to hold all the lyrics files. The best way to do this is, in my opinion, to build something with PHP and mySQL. PHP is a basic programming language for the Web, and mySQL is a free database management package. Any decent web host will offer these with some of their packages.

Of course, it means you need to do some programming Smiling If you don't think you know enough to do something like this, see if you can find someone who does - making a text file for each song isn't exactly fun.

They have: 5,633 posts

Joined: Jan 1970

I have tried ! everyone I have talked to is too busy so far.

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Get your Lyrics at:
[url] www.lyricsh.com[/url]

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