Hi,

I have been a regular around HA for a while and have been actively promoting the FLAC format trying to get software developers to add FLAC support in their products for a few years now. It is nice to see Winamp and Easy Media Creator natively supporting FLAC now.

I appreciate all that Josh has done in developing this wonderful lossless audio format, FLAC. I asked him a while back if it was OK for me to work on a campaign to help FLAC become more popular and he said he was fine with that.

My whole goal over these past few years has been to see FLAC be accepted by mainstream app developers and ultimately by more customers/users of their programs. I have also promoted various FLAC supporting programs/software authors over the years as well.

To continue in that tradition of promoting the FLAC file format, I have recently purchased a FLAC related domain name and have developed an informational FLAC site up on that domain.

It is still in its early stages, and not quite finished, but traffic has been increasing the last 2 weeks or so since I placed it up. I optimized it and am trying to make it a user-friendly and informative site to promote FLAC.

I am linking back to Josh's official FLAC site at http://flac.sourceforge.net at various places in the new site, plus I make it clear on the home page that this is not the official FLAC site to avoid confusion.

I quote the site's "mission statement" at the bottom of the FLAC FAQ that reads:

"...is actively involved in providing free information and resources to help the FLAC format gain in popularity. You can help FLAC to grow by placing a text link to this site on one or more of the pages on your web site(s). We appreciate all the sites that link back to us. The more sites and people that use FLAC, the more likely other software and hardware that haven't yet added native FLAC support will do so quickly. Please kindly ask the developers of any audio related software you use to consider adding native FLAC support to their software. After all, FLAC is free, the source code is free, so why shouldn't the developers allow their users a choice of more audio file formats to be supported? Thanks again for helping FLAC become an even more popular lossless audio format."

All input is appreciated on how to make this free informational site a better asset to helping to promote the FLAC file format. You basically can call this a "fan site" for the FLAC audio format

I hope Josh likes it as well. I am looking forward to the "official" release notice here on HA and on your site for FLAC 1.1.3, Josh. Keep up the good work.

P.S. If you are a developer of a FLAC supporting application and want to be listed on this informational site in the FLAC FAQ, send me an E-mail to my E-mail address listed on the site's main page.

Please ignore the "Featured Music" and "Featured Audios" links as they are place-holders and will be replaced by music content soon.

this may be because i work hosting/domain provider, but honestly your site looks like generic search page. Also there is a link to chapel.info at the bottom for some reason. You have the right idea, it's just not visually appealing to the mass market, which is who you are trying to appeal to.

Nice informational site, not too sure on the design though.

Good job though

.
Dude,

Great idea, I too am a FLAC junkie! Couple of things, you might want to dump the links, (I know, you said to ignore them, but folks will still click - cause' we're a curious bunch), to the God stuff - thats just going to turn a whack of folks off right off the bat. If you want to fill those slots with great FLAC files, I suggest you start your search here:

Archive Dot Org

I'll give you any assistance I possibly can, including hosting some of the FLAC files if that helps with any bandwidth issues that might arise. If you want to grab some really nice Open Source templates to create a very nice looking site, check out these three sites:

Andreas Viklund

Open Web Design

Open Source Web Design

Will put links to your site and the main FLAC site in Friday's postings on my site as well.

Andrew D.
cdnav.com


.

Thanks for your suggestions. Link you mentioned has been removed.


Thanks for you comments. The design is mine and I have been using that design for many years on other sites. It is not a generic search page though. It is however optimized for search engine robots...


Links dumped and replaced with 'Music coming soon' and 'Audio coming soon' placeholders until I put music links up. Thanks for your tips as well.

Being optimised for search engines is no longer an excuse for a site to look bad. Given the context I understand that it is very important here, but I think you're using that as an excuse for your design.

I don't understand why you would cram the whole home page content into such a small area leaving unused whitespace elsewhere.

The restricted design leads you to using no design at all on pages that have a lot of information, which is a shame, as all you can do is go back to the homepage to navigate to other areas of your site.

Your featured music is in MP3 format, which I found a little confusing. As the links are direct to the files I would suggest putting the filesize up as well, so users know what they are getting themselves into.

Good luck with the site, I'm sure your efforts are appreciated.

Thanks for your input. I have removed the music links that pointed to .mp3 files as they were placeholder from a previous use of this design template from another site. Will look at site re-design options. Thanks!

Great idea, goodnews! I'd like to see a short description of the page at the top (which would also be useful for search engine indexing). Just something that describes what the page tries to do (inform about FLAC, and give links to useful resources). There is something like what I think of at the bottom of the page, but it's unlikely to be read, since it looks like a legal statement.

Also, I find menus on both sides of of the page highly confusing. I see you have no CSS on the page, if you know someone who can help you with it, that is a sure way of styling up the page. If you're interested in a bit more flexible menu system Mr. Steve Gibson has made a handy-dandy CSS menu available free for use at His page.

So, just a few pointers, and of course it's all IMHO, I'm sure others have different preferences.
Again, great idea, Adam (from the domain Whois, if that isn't you, than pardon).

Thank you for your comments! I appreciate all the input from everybody.

Great initiative, goodnews!

I would agree with QHOBBES: at the first glance the site looked like a placeholder/catalog for a reserved domain name.

Some useful links for your site content:
Cool The Lossless Audio Blog
Spread FLAC Campaign

Some links for design inspiration:
http://www.rubyonrails.com/
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
http://www.vorbis.com/
http://lame.sourceforge.net/index.php

Ugh, I love this one
http://www.opera.com/

I'd like to suggest a few things:

1. A brief description of FLAC right on the front page and why it is gaining popularity
2. A link for CD ripping to FLAC (or if I missed it, then one that is much better worded)
3. On a secondary or subsequent page, mention EAC + Mareo combo which allows for multiple lossless + lossy conversions with tagging, replaygain, cuesheets, etc.