This month's website has been put forward by Kym who is the Area Rep for Devon and Cornwall and it is the Flute Cocktail site (www.flutecocktail.co.uk). Flute Cocktail is Devon’s largest flute choir.

The website has a nice look and feel to it and I liked the graphic along the top of the page which works well. I also liked the colour scheme with nice use of graduated colouring based around a common colour scheme. Fonts with joined up writing can be difficult to read if they are too small but this works well on the site and gives a good look and feel as I mentioned before.

The most important thing about a site is the content. The most pretty and wonderfully engineered sites are useless if they don’t give you up to date information that you need quickly without spending a lot of time working out where everything is. Clearly this site is up to date as is shown by the snow warning. This site is crammed full of content – future events, galleries of previous events, bio’s, sample repertoire and useful links. The first two gallery formats are very nice and very innovative as galleries can be a bit boring if they are just lots of pictures one after another. Check out as an example: http://www.flutecocktail.co.uk/Festival_09_gallery.html.

Kym mentioned in her note to me that it has expanded over the years and “is now something of a maze”. With websites that have grown over time it is worth taking a step back periodically, looking at the content and coming up with a design that fits the latest structure.  I would recommend having navigation links over every page somewhere near the top – some of the pages have the links right at the bottom of large pages. However, I think the important thing about links is that they are consistent i.e they are on the same place on every page.

From a technical perspective my resident techie had a few suggestions. I don’t know if you have an analytics tool but Google Analytics is a great FREE tool which gives a really good insight into who is using the site, where they are and what they are looking at. I liked the background image (280k) and the moving graphic but they are both quite large. I would suggest having a look at the image and see if it can be reduced to something a bit more friendly to people with slower links. The site worked better on Internet Explorer than Firefox which had a couple of quirks with the menu and is something to watch when you are testing the site. Lastly my techie said that you should probably lose the visitor counter as it is only really useful to the Web Master and Google Analytics will give you loads more info. His actual comment was that it was a bit passé.

Overall a site should reflect the organisation and this site feels like a group that is very active, keen to promote itself with a lot of good ideas and enthusiasm and I wish you every success.

Tony Barr

tony.barr@tesco.net