Our first recipient of the Best Band Web Site Award is presented to the Brandon Valley High School Band of Brandon, South Dakota as directed by Mr. Robert Goheen, Kevin Kessler, and Bruce Wildes. The Brandon Valley Webmaster is Charlie Henson.

Brandon Valley has done a great job of putting out the information that students and parents most often are searching for when they go to their local band web site.  The information is easy to navigate and seems to be regularly updated.  Great job to the web crew at Brandon Valley!  

To help other band web sites improve on their own site designs here are some comments about the things that helped  Brandon Valley  earn the award for July 2006.

{mosimage}Visual Comments:

The site has a nice theme to it that is fairly consistent throughout the site.  Plain old black and red can get boring, but the web master has done a nice job of varying the layout of each page just enough to keep it interesting without destroying the continuity of the design.  At the same time the front page logo has been carried over to the interior pages, binding the site together.  The javascript rollovers in a piano style layout are effective and draw the eye into the page.  One minor  suggestion would be to consider making the text visible in a faded color without having to mouse over the keys.  It actually took me a minute to realize that this was a navigation menu until I accidentally moused over the keyboard and saw the links pop up.

The individual pages of the site are well written and updated frequently.  The home page is done with a fixed page width, however as you navigate to other pages the text fills the entire screen from edge to edge and breaks that nice feel we got from the home page.  This leads to a suggestion to web masters to try to use a fixed page width for all of your pages.  780 pixels wide is about standard these days for page width.

Technical Comments: 

The Brandon Valley High School Band Web Site shows many of the tenets of good web site design.  The home page is clean with nice contrast between the red and black colors.  The total home page size is very small, coming in at under 40K!  This is very hard to do these days and still produce a nice looking page.  But small size has its benefits.  A home user on a dial-up modem will only have to wait a few seconds for this entire page to load.  The images on the site are well optimized.  They have been trimmed down to their display size with an editing program rather than by loading a large image and forcing the browser to resize it. 

Kudos to the Brandon Valley High School Band for publishing such a well written site!