Hey GameDev Community,

I recently overhauled my website, and would like feedback from unbiased strangers about its effectiveness. I'm a composer, so please let me know what you would recommend as if you were considering hiring me; if there is anything you would want to see that isn't on my site, or if anything that is on my site would be a deal-breaker for you.

Thanks a bunch!

Brandon Higley
[email="composer@brandonhigley.com"]composer@brandonhigley.com[/email]

Hi Brandon - nice site! I like the graphic design on the header, it looks very pro.

A couple of thoughts (bear in mind I'm a User Experience Designer in my day job so I might be overly critical!)

- The point size is a little small. I'd make it a bit bigger so help readability

- I wouldn't include info about your site design on the front page. It would be more useful if you had some relevant material to the potential visitor (e.g. latest additions to your portfolio, recent work that has been published, blog posts, etc). Which leads on to...

- Remember that the #1 aim of your site is to get people to listen to your music. To this end, I would suggest making the music player on the right way more prominent so it leaps out at the user. Additionally, you don't have a "portfolio" link on your nav bar. This would be the second place people will look for your music. Basically you have to make sure anyone coming to your site can find your music straight away, or they'll get confused and leave.

- Put your contact info on the header of your site (ideally email, twitter & phone number) in regular text format (i.e. don't encode them into an image) so that people can copy-paste them. Again, having a separate page for contact is fine - there's no harm in having multiple ways of doing something on a site in order to support the different ways people use the web.

Hope that helps. Keep up the good work!

Thanks for the help! I'm going to be out all weekend but when I get back I'll get to work on making the site's goal more achievable. Thanks!

I updated the layout of the site. I'm not sure how to make the player pop, but I did mention it in the text of my new portfolio page.

Looking nice - one thing I did notice though was your music player is displaying "null" and doesn't have anything cued up. I'm guessing the reference to wherever your audio files are stored has gone wonky?

Sometimes is does that, and I don't know why. Usually, closing the browser and re-opening my page helps; I should contact the player's coder and see if it's a known bug.

Anyway, I need help figuring out what to do with my home/welcome page, now. Should I add a picture of myself? Is it okay as it is? I don't know, so any help is appreciated!

I think a photo and a brief bio is useful on the front page - It's a bit like a C.V/Resume I suppose so I would put the same kind of info on there - relevant project history, education, any awards or praise, etc.

There's a kinda rule of thumb with website design that I always fall foul of, which is: content first, design second. Work out what information you need to display, then work a design around that. I always get caught up in the exciting bit (designing) and then realising my content doesn't fit into the cool design I've just made. If you find yourself with a bunch of pages hanging off your site which you're not sure what to do with you may want to rethink the design a little bit, now that you know what it is you want to say.

As for the player thing, deffo get that fixed ASAP! The last thing you want is prospective clients visiting your site and not being able to hear your work!

Hope that all helps.