Hi Everyone,

 

I usually read this forum without posting but I have recently finished a project and decided it would be good to post it to you all to get feedback on it plus take more of an active role on the site .

 

The site is www.emuzo.co.uk. The sites ethos is to provide a truely original and new way to find musicians - all for free! I did this by using the google maps api to plot the adverts on a map so people can use radius searchs to find adverts.

 

On a visual design level, I wanted to keep it a simple as possible as to not confuse the user. The back end uses 2 MySQL databases. One for the post code geodata and the other for the sites adverts, messages and account info etc.

 

It's taken the best part of 6 months to put together as I changed my mind on the layout 4 times! It is now 95% there, with the odd thing I am going to tweak over the coming weeks.

 

Please, be my guest to take a look - your critique is very welcome.

 

www.emuzo.co.uk

 

Thanks

Kevin

Just a quick note. There a three dumy adverts placed there all withing 25mile radius of Cardiff....

I feel like because of the members only thing I don't see enough of what it actually does, there's no lure for me to join. The design is very clean.

I feel like because of the members only thing I don't see enough of what it actually does, there's no lure for me to join. The design is very clean.

 

Point taken. One of my to do's is to make better use of the index page and space for signposts/instructions.

Hi Kevin

 

Might I suggest ditching the landing page altogether? If I stumbled the page you linked to I'd have moved on immediately but if I landed on your search page, even with no musical interest, I would have stopped to take a look.

 

From a user point of view on the search, I would like the search to remember what I'd just searched for so that rather than re-enter all search criteria, I could just change a single parameter.

 

Also I'd make the reason for failures to find any adverts more obvious, perhaps over the map, and phrase them in plain English - I think I got one error (possibly red wine vision kicking in) referring to the 'web app' or 'database' which isn't much help to your users.

 

Other than that, from a user point of view it looks a really nicely executed site.

 

Would the concept work as a widget that could be plugged into other sites?

Hi Ian,

 

Thanks for taking the time to have a look at the website.

 

I'm still debating whether to go straight to the search page or make use of the index page in some capacity to address what the site is about.

 

Yes, point taken on the error messages. I need to spend some time with them not only in displaying something useful, but it logs the error and notifies me so I can investigate.

 

There is potential I guess in widgetising the app in some way, although it depends in what way would I widgetise it. Did you have something in mind?