Thomas Hambach

The launch of the new website of “De Kreuners” was announced 2 weeks in advance on almost every radio station, in many magazines and even on national television. Since I’m a huge fan of them (read: they’re alright), I had to endure 2 weeks of sleepless nights, constantly pondering how awesome the new website would be!

As of today, the new website of “De Kreuners” has been made available. But can we call the new website an improvement? Was it really worth all those nights pressing the f5 button repeatedly, hoping to catch a glimpse of it? Read on!

I was driving home when I heard the news on the radio, a young woman, Layla, explained how exhausting it has been to find the right setup, content, pictures and information for the new website. Hearing this, I immediately put the pedal to the metal, ignored a few red lights and raced home.

So I finally managed to open Internet Explorer (read: Firefox sucks), typed in the URI and… Oh noes… What did I see there?

Yep, you’re looking at it. “Untitled Document”. That almost made me cry. Too bad I was soon facing a lot more of “kinks” a professional website bureau shouldn’t make these days.

Ok, so I managed to get over that and tried to look around the website… Wait… the website… where is it? Soon I noticed it was hiding under a huge image which should be addressed as their web site’s header. The monster is 924x450pixels!

Finding out the exact size of that image was a bit of a mess too… it seems like it is hiding behind another huge image, good for another 3 megabyte. This time a PNG that creates the “grungy” border effect. Too bad that 80% of this PNG is transparent and completely useless. Also,I hope the website never reaches a height higher than 3000pixels. or their cool border is going to screw everything up.

Digging a bit deeper, it seemed like the background image has the same lard-ass problem. This one weights about 1 full megabite. At least they tried to save some bandwidth by making it a .gif.

Moving on, the color scheme of the website isn’t bad at all! I’m also pretty happy by the way they designed the menu, it has a nice “feel” and it’s good that they added rollovers. Though, again, after taking a closer look… no alt text filled in. Well, it’s not that it would matter that much since the URL structure doesn’t seem to had a lot of thought either.

Clicking on “Foto & Video” (read: Pictures & Video), I was a bit disappointed that I didn’t find any pictures… Where are these hiding?

Intermezzo: Facing serious download time issues. On the upside, I can go to the fridge whenever i try to open a new page.

After clicking some of the menu items, I got the feeling that every page is the same and is was time to stop browsing this website. If I didn’t like the band, I probably wouldn’t visit this website ever again.

As for the final verdicht: 20/100

(I used sitescore to assist me in making this list: http://queromediashare.com/sitescore/dekreuners.be)

Negative

• No use of ALT tags
• No use of logic pagenaming
• No page title
• No page description
• Website header dimensions are too high
• Overall image size is too large
• No RSS feed of the latest news or gigs
• Invalid HTML & CSS
• No Sitemap
• Overall design is quite basic
• No custom error page
• …

Positive

• Color scheme and the contrast between the colors
• Text links at the bottom of the website
• 1024×786 compatible
• Works in IE & Firefox (read: Firefux)
• All hyper links are working