Suggestions for new Church Music site
Posted: Mon Sep 05, 2011 12:18 am
I understand that this subforum is specifically about work on the replacement for the current church music viewer/player. As a pretty frequent user of the Church music site, allow me to make a few observations and suggestions on this project. I'm no programmer, but I am a musician, and I can tell you what would influence me to use the site more.
1. The navigation capabilities are pretty clunky. Let's say that I want to find a song - As Sisters in Zion. I click on the Hymns link, click Alphabetical - by Title, then click A. It's not there. I have to click the "Next" button to open the hymn. The player pops up in a new window. It takes some time loading the notes, then I press play. Even on a fairly fast computer, the beat isn't steady, and many of the notes are not held for their proper durations. Then, if I click on the "sisterhood" topic to find more songs on the same theme, it opens another tab in my original window to look at it. That's a lot of clicks and a lot of windows for the job it does. Searching by hymn number is even more convoluted. A simple list of numbers would suffice.
2. It's hard to find the live recordings. Within the player, links to download the mp3 recordings should appear with each hymn or children's song. Currently, they are playable through the player, but finding the downloads is a challenge.
3. How about simple Previous and Next buttons? If I'm on hymn 40, it should take one click to get to hymn 41. Currently, it requires switching windows, clicking on the "Hymns" link, doing a search by hymn number, and clicking several times to get to 41.
4. Why not add "other music" to the dropdown of possible publications? If certain pieces are not yet formatted for the player, the PDFs could be displayed in the window instead of the player format.
More to come. Thanks for all the work you do.
1. The navigation capabilities are pretty clunky. Let's say that I want to find a song - As Sisters in Zion. I click on the Hymns link, click Alphabetical - by Title, then click A. It's not there. I have to click the "Next" button to open the hymn. The player pops up in a new window. It takes some time loading the notes, then I press play. Even on a fairly fast computer, the beat isn't steady, and many of the notes are not held for their proper durations. Then, if I click on the "sisterhood" topic to find more songs on the same theme, it opens another tab in my original window to look at it. That's a lot of clicks and a lot of windows for the job it does. Searching by hymn number is even more convoluted. A simple list of numbers would suffice.
2. It's hard to find the live recordings. Within the player, links to download the mp3 recordings should appear with each hymn or children's song. Currently, they are playable through the player, but finding the downloads is a challenge.
3. How about simple Previous and Next buttons? If I'm on hymn 40, it should take one click to get to hymn 41. Currently, it requires switching windows, clicking on the "Hymns" link, doing a search by hymn number, and clicking several times to get to 41.
4. Why not add "other music" to the dropdown of possible publications? If certain pieces are not yet formatted for the player, the PDFs could be displayed in the window instead of the player format.
More to come. Thanks for all the work you do.