This month we bent the rules a bit and selected a high school band web site that was above the limit for page size.  Our criteria states that the best web sites are also sites that use very little bandwidth, but sometimes the visual design of a site is so eye catching that you just have to acknowledge it even when it clocks in at a whopping 314k!

Visual Comments:

Wow, nice and clean with great vivid images.   The graphics are laid out nicely and are chosen specifically for their visual appeal.  They have used the images from recent band CD's that they have created over the past several years.  Even these CD cases are stunning.  Kudos to Mr. Nassar as the visual designer at St. Amant!

The layout of the menus are easy to navigate.  No confusing submenus or strange categories to hop through.  Just eight items laid out horizontally  in a color that contrasts nicely with the rest of the page.   The only page that does not fit in with the rest of the site's template is the calendar and this is understandable.  They are perl script called CalendarScript to maintain their band calendar, a great idea for any organization.  Scripts such as this one are usually free to use and can make displaying event information incredibly easy and functional.

Technical Comments: 

These days everyone does flash animations on their pages, and most of them do it badly.  Some sites use it as a splash screen that you have to click through in order to get to the actual home page of the site which only slows the visitor down and eats up more bandwidth.  In the case of St. Amant they have created a small Flash animation that does not detract from the rest of the page.  It might be a nice change to set the animation to only run one time through as the page loads.  Repetitive graphics or animations of any kind can wear on the eyes after a while.  If you are going to use flash make sure to set them to only repeat one or two times.  After the viewer sees it once it is no longer important to the content of the site.

The other images that are used on the home page are nicely done and sized appropriately, there are just a lot of them (hence the 300+k file size for the entire page.  On a dial up modem this page might take as long as a full minute to download.  However, in the case of St. Amant they have done their best to keep these files compressed as much as possible.  There is nothing worse than a web site that does not edit and resize their images down to the smallest file size necessary.   We were also very impressed with image selection in general on this site.  Obviously they did some digging to find some very nice, attractive images of their band.

The St. Amant Band also provides users with a place to view and download their performances over the past three years.  It can be debated whether or not this is a good idea in the legal sense, but they have done an excellent job organizing and categorizing these clips as well.  

Overall the St. Amant High School Band Web Site is a credit to the Band and it's faculty, especially the designer, Mr.  Nassar.  Excellent job guys and congratulations!