The End... or is it?

Well it’s all over, well the school presentation of it. The worries and bumps along the way paid off. With just two nights one of which was far too long, the site was a success. However, there’s still a lot more work to do because after all it’s not just a mere school project, this is going to be the band’s actual site.

Let me start with the problems I’ve been plagued with. Honestly, I thought I was going to fail, because I was having a BAD case of creative block. I had the theme in mind but just didn’t know how to go about putting it to ‘paper’. Eventually I just started playing around in Fireworks looking for backgrounds and what not.

The theme I had for the site was to make it look like a newspaper. The band loved it and so did my lecturer. Unfortunately I was having trouble with some of the code and I had to ask a friend for a bit of help not to mention I was also stressed for time to encode the video needed to include on the site as well as audio. So with two nights left I tried desperately to encode video from a DVD into a web friendly format that even a Mac user can have access to it.

My friend, helped with the CSS showing me the best ways to layout the site using the popular coding style. We were trying our best to adhere today’s web standard and I’d like to think we were successful. For purposes of presentation and to get it done fast, we opted to make regular HTML pages, though the finished site will incorporate PHP code and make full use of web databases and admin sections for the members to update news items and the like for themselves.

Using a handy feature in Dreamweaver we made a template that allowed me to easily make the other pages and ensure that they all have a level of consistency. Also, what ever changes we made to the main template file would be made through out the site, this was great for navigation editing. The same can be done with CSS, using one external file that all the pages read from we can easily make changes to this one file and have it affect all the other pages. This saves me from having to edit each page one by one so you can imagine how much that was a time saver.

Thinking about it, while the page making did take practically a whole night, the video encoding took the longest because it was a bit of a nightmare to get a decent sized video in an enjoyable quality. It actually took me a few days to find the right format, which is MPEG – 1. For some reason MPEG – II was not viewable in the Quicktime player so I had to downgrade it to MPEG-1. However, when we finish the site the videos will be hosted on Youtube, to take up less server space and download time for viewers.

As for the audio I just took some video that I was not going to use on the site and took out the audio and converted them to 128kbps Stereo MP3 files. The songs were taking from their band practice sessions, which in my opinion give it a nice intimate vibe making you feel like you’re there while they’re working on the songs.

When time came to show the site to my class and lecturer I was very nervous because I knew the site was indeed far from finished. However, I was pleasantly surprised to see how much of a hit the site was with everyone in class. I did mention that we still has a lot to do and that the layout could change drastically over time, but this was a good start. We – me and the band as well as my friend – want to make the site as close as possible to a classic newspaper layout. So far I really think we are getting close to it.

As for the content like the pictures audio and video, they were all done by me except a few pictures in the gallery. I shot the video and took the audio from it using my consumer end Cannon Powershot, which took some amazing quality video and audio for a consumer camera.

Overall the site at its current state can be used but it’s really not how I intend. The audience feedback was very positive and showed that the idea and the site is very much user friendly and will attract the visitor ensuring they keep coming back to the site. It definitely is a unique site, as said by both my lecturer and a class mate and I believe it’s definitely something that can stand out among other musicians’ sites.

Anyway, with out further adieu here is the URL: http://www.the-generals.net

You can keep checking it out, we might take it down temporarily...

Take care for now,
Saeed