Sycross Music

Well, I’ve gotten some suggestions to raise the bitrate of the Mp3s which I offer from my order page, so I decided I would do so. The Mp3’s are now all 256 kbps, rather than the previous 192 kbps. The new bitrate matches the quality of premium iTunes downloads.

I’ve also made some minor upgrades to the shopping cart. In response to some inquiries about international shipping prices, I’ve added a new feature in which the shopping cart can now calculate shipping prices based on location and number of CDs ordered. This is a lot more accurate than my previous system, which only charged a flat rate shipping price of $2, regardless if you were ordering 20 CDs from half-way across the world.

As you can see, I always try to respond to user feedback. So if you guys have any other complaints or suggestions, just let me know!

This really isn’t “news” persay… but I’d just thought I would vent my frustration here. My sentiments right now can be expressed in one simple sentence: I hate internet explorer.

Please, if you are using IE, SWITCH. I implore you to. Internet explorer is an absolutely terribly browser which makes all web designers’ lives so much more difficult.

Anyhow… basicaly I’ve just made some minor changes to the site. It’s nothing that would affect firefox, chrome, opera, or safari users. But for the IE users out there, I’ve just put some serious time into fixing bugs with IE’s rendering system. The good news is, my website will now finally display correctly in essentially all major browsers. Hooray!

After scrutinizing my site objectively, I realized that the old template wasn’t practical at all. The main content of the page was given almost no room, and this was making it difficult to read. So, I’ve been working for the past two days straight to design a completely new website! The new design features a bold header–as you probably noticed when you visited the site–and a general rearrangement of the site layout. With the new design, I was able to standardize all elements of the website, so that your browsing experience is totally smooth.

Standardizing the forums… and especially this blog/news area was incredibly time-consuming, but it was actually relatively free of headaches, as all this web designing has made me much more proficient with html/css/php.

In general, I think that the new template does a much better job of showcasing what this site was originally created for–my music. Now, on almost every page (with the exception of this page and the forums) you can find a sleek little music player on the side bar!

Perhaps you’ve also noticed that I’ve added some new pages to the site. These pages are still in development, but I think they will make good additions to the website. The pages are “Free Stuff” and “Contribute.” On the free stuff page, I will be occasionally adding some free songs/loops for you to download! And after getting these free downloads, you now have a way to help me out. With the contribute page, I’ll be posting ways for loyal fans to help promote this site and my music.

Please let me know what you guys think! The old template can be found at: http://www.sycrossmusic.com/old/.

Well, my old news system wasn’t very advanced (it lacked many features, such as the ability to comment on posts). In response to this I’ve just integrated a completely new system to keep track of the latest updates! This new system is driven by WordPress, an excellent free blogging script. Some of the new features include commenting on posts, creating usernames, and subscribing via RSS. I encourage you all to take full advantage of these new features!

This site is officiallly up and running!

Switched to a new web host: fanst.net