The Site
Return to Dark-House: Legacy
With work being so insane these past couple months, music development became virtually impossible for both Mike and I. For me, the gap was filled in short stretches trying to make the new site look at least "approachable" in case we have any casual visitors. I wanted a flash based jukebox with our songs. My nephew had intially written one for me, but he was too busy to add more than the basic features (which were still pretty good), so I invested in the CoffeeCup Web Jukebox. Nice little product. Spent some time customizing it by designing some skins (downloadable to the public), got involved in their forums a bit, offered an xml sdk, etc. Their forum admin people actually began referring questions about skinning to me, here at dar-house.org. That's kind of cool.
Anyway... Right now "just about" every link has at least a "place holder" page, if not some relevent content. We don't have anything for the store yet, though it would be nice someday if we could have various items (you know, hats, bumper stickers, t shirts, cards, pens, decals, posters...) with the logos and art we have created for the site (largely me at this point, but I expect Mike will jump in more when he has time.) I feell like the site does not currently have enough continuity to its look and feel. Part of that was by design. I definitely wanted the main page to be different from the individual projects (Legacy, and Dark Random Thoughts). I also wanted those indvidual projects to be different from one another. I guess using that guideline, it only follows that a certain amount of consistency would be lost.
It was fun building the "about us" questionnaire. That will probably grow over time. Mike still has a few to answer. When I was loading up the page, and reading our respective answers, it amused me how little cross-over there was between our answers. In a lot of cases, it was almost like looking at opposites (literally in the case of Fire/Water ... Spring/Winter...) I think the only thing we both agreed on were favorite actress Winona Ryder, and actor, Ed Norton. This must be why there is a good creative mix when we collaborate. We are not so far apart in our concepts ... but there is definitely a difference in our driving forces.
It bugs me that if a visitor goes to the blog and forum, they are redirected off the site, but I don't seem to have way to put a direct link to go BACK to our MAIN site. I had tried adding a hyperlink, but the CS2 was changing the link code on me. I'll need to try again later. Maybe I'll start adding a link back to Legacy in the individual blogs.
I have a whole page of news built with RSS feeds. It takes about 15 seconds to load since it has so many news and entertainment feeds. http://dark-house.org/myPortal/portal.asp The stocks that are currently on the page are ones that I am watching. The RSS gets transformed on the server. That also slows it down, but at least there is no issue with browser compatability when it is transformed... unlike client-side solutions.