Band website... critique away

I'm working on a band website for my band as well as to apply for a scholarship.. so it needs to be good. I don't have content in,and my flash and some images aren't completely refined yet. Just let me know about the layout and how you think it looks.
Diaspora

The background is really distracting in my opnion. I think the actual site is pretty decent except for the jaggy text at the top left and bottom right.

Also the red text at the bottom is really hard to read.

I'd say, put a light pain colour as the background and it'd make it look 10x better. :D :D

I wouldn't have that mouse thing when you go into flash... its distracting to have your normal cursor... then on mousover of your menu/header... you get antoher one...

yeh the mouse in the menu isnt working too well ;)
and even when it does work it doesnt look good to be honest, if ur gonna have a costume pointer change the design a bit ;)

and, for the menu to work u have to click right on the text, if u click above it the lower frame displays a white page with the text "pers"

other then that i think its a nice site =)

i agree re the mouse effct, it distracting.. best to keep it as the standard one... and instead of having the small square mouseover effect, how about mouseover the whole headshot..just an idea

otherwise, its a start...
cheers
heathrowe

I agree with the others... The custom mouse pointer is pointless and distracting, and when you mouse over a link you see both the custom cursor and the standard browser cursor, on top of each other. The link areas are also very small and tough to click on.

The layout is quite broken in Firebird and Opera on the PC, and only looks correct in IE. In other browsers the flash is resized and distorted and there is a space between it and the iFrame. The background is distracting. Both the page background and the iFrame background.

The typestyle is boring... Just standard times roman... Plus the monospaced vertical font on the left doesn't really have any point or need to be there, since you already have the band name in red in the Flash part.

The red text at the bottom is competely unreadable...

Overall it doesn't really fit together... what are the 100101010101001 backgrounds for? What does that have to do with the band? Why use an old-fashioned typewriter style font with all those futuristic 010101010's? Why use an iFrame at all? It would be much easier to use if it was just a solid HTML page for each section. etc...

ha.. good... most of the stuff you didn't like i was thinking of changing anyways. let's see: the red text was left over from a former color scheme that turned everything pink. forgot to change that. the pointer i was def. going to change if i kept it but definitely agree with you on getting rid of it. i'm in the middle of changing the buttons already....
deker- how do you get the layout to work in opera? i noticed that and have been looking around to figure that one out. Why does it resize it?
thanks for the advice

I like the whole thing with the faces and the buttons...

I don't know why it's being distorted in non-IE browsers... I've never used Flash or tried to insert it on a web page.

It's pretty cool, close to being awesome.
I know the design stereotype is to show band members looking cool and serious and dark. If there's any way around it, test it out. Right now a Giants hat and a pair of glasses are all that sets these guys apart from the millions of other bands. Try showing me right away that these guys are different and rock my pants off.
The mouse effect is cool, and I would make the boxes even smaller and have greater variety in fades.
I agree with deker with getting rid of the binary code background.
And the info of the page seems very stretched out...the most important stuff with a band site is the free music to download and latest concert dates. Have that stuff readily available without needing to scroll down.

-dave
http://okaysamurai.com