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Topic: New website from a template - good idea?

Lyle Romer
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1400
From: Davie, FL, USA
Registered: May 2002

posted 02-13-2016 05:05 PM

Bobby,

I agree with your points about how responsive web design kills actual design. On one point:

quote: Bobby Henderson
If you properly compose your image the "responsive" image frames might change their shape and crop your image in all sorts of stupid, unpredictable ways

You can set images to resize and maintain their aspect ratio based on the viewport size. It doesn't help with laying images out with others but it will keep them looking like the original.

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Mike Frese
Master Film Handler

Posts: 465
From: Holts Summit, MO
Registered: Jun 2007

posted 02-13-2016 09:18 PM

Mike,

I think your website is fine. I just have one suggestion and that would be a link to a trailer for the movie when they click on the poster.

quote: Kenneth Wuepper
Here is what our page looks like.

http://templetheatre.com/

It is maintained by our staff and although it loads pretty slowly it is not unlike your sample.
KEN

Your page is way to slow to load.

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Mike Blakesley
Film God

Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99

posted 02-13-2016 09:38 PM

quote: Rick Raskin
One comment though, I think the collage of photos at the top of the page looks a little busy.

I tend to agree on that, especially if looking at it on a phone.

quote: Mike Frese
I just have one suggestion and that would be a link to a trailer for the movie when they click on the poster.

I have 2 reasons for not including trailer links:

1. The trailers always have the release dates and we don't always play the movies on those dates;

and more importantly

2. I was finding it difficult to get trailers that didn't have a stupid ad in front, or an unrelated pop-up, or whatever so I gave up. Maybe it's easier to get 'clean' trailers now...?

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Justin Hamaker
Film God

Posts: 2253
From: Lakeport, CA USA
Registered: Jan 2004

posted 02-13-2016 10:00 PM

Most of the studios have YouTube channels where they post all of their trailers. I get most of the ones on my web site from there. They usually have a thing on the end of the trailer with links to their various social media sites, but they are usually free from popups and other garbage.

As long as your play date is listed before they even click the trailer, I don't think having a date on the trailer should be an issue.

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Frank Cox
Film God

Posts: 2234
From: Melville Saskatchewan Canada
Registered: Apr 2011

posted 02-13-2016 10:34 PM

I think one of the cardinal sins of websites is slow loading. People are used to and want instant results, and if a page takes forever to load they're likely to go away and click on something else.

One of the major things that causes slow loading is websites that will do lookups and download content from dozens or even hundreds of outside websites in the process of getting the information that the user is actually looking for. These outside websites can provide everything from advertising to javascript or ajax frameworks to tracking pixels and you name it. And a lot of those outside sites are so overloaded that they can take a very long time to respond. I don't see why you need to drag in a bunch of cgi executables simply to show potential customers what's playing at your theatre. Locally hosted html works fine for that purpose since that content is (or should be) mostly static content anyway. Customers don't need or want to wait while your script fires off a sql query to a third-party server to get today's movie listings, then queries yet another third-party server to decide how to show the graphic, and then hits google analytics "just because"; all the customer really wants to know is what's playing tonight at 7pm! And if your movies really do change that frequently, just write a program to query the database generate a static webpage when you make a change, and then cache and serve that page to your customers instead of doing a lookup every damn time.

With today's expectations, a super-slow website could actually cost you business.

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Buck Wilson
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 894
From: St. Joseph MO, USA
Registered: Sep 2010

posted 02-14-2016 12:00 AM

Sam, your rules page is indeed great.

But you're missing a period after "...head west until you get here" in response to one of the "conveniently located from..." FAQs

[Razz]

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David Buckley
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 525
From: Oxford, N. Canterbury, New Zealand
Registered: Aug 2004

posted 02-14-2016 02:14 PM

quote: Frank Cox
You might want to consider getting an app. I wrote an Android app for my theatre a couple of years ago...

Come on Frank, you can't just leave that there. Tell us more...

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Frank Cox
Film God

Posts: 2234
From: Melville Saskatchewan Canada
Registered: Apr 2011

posted 02-14-2016 02:42 PM

I don't know what more to say about it. I wrote an app that tells people what's playing at my theatre, mostly as an exercise to learn a bit about Android programming. I posted the app on Google Play, here.

I printed a QR code on paper that contains an automatic redirect from my webpage to the above google play url. (I did it that way so I can see how many people use the QR code as the hits then get logged on my server, and I can also change the destination URL if I ever need to without having to change the QR code. Neither of those things would happen if I set the QR code directly to the google play url.)

I hung the QR code print-out on the wall of my lobby, here:

I occasionally see people scanning that QR code with their phones and google developer page tells me that the app is currently installed on a couple of hundred devices, so it turned out to be a worthwhile endeavour.

A friend of mine runs the local cell phone store so he uses my app to demonstrate how to read a QR code and install an app when one of his customers requests it.

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David Buckley
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 525
From: Oxford, N. Canterbury, New Zealand
Registered: Aug 2004

posted 02-14-2016 02:58 PM

I'm androidly-challenged, so I cant try it right now, but the screenshots look really good, and the QR code ideas are excellent. What toolset did you use to build the app?

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Frank Cox
Film God

Posts: 2234
From: Melville Saskatchewan Canada
Registered: Apr 2011

posted 02-14-2016 03:04 PM

RFO-Basic

You can download my app as an Eclipse project if you like, here.

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Justin Hamaker
Film God

Posts: 2253
From: Lakeport, CA USA
Registered: Jan 2004

posted 02-14-2016 04:09 PM

Frank, do you know if this is able to access a MySQL database? I see it supports HTML and javascript, but I don't see any mention of PHP.

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Frank Cox
Film God

Posts: 2234
From: Melville Saskatchewan Canada
Registered: Apr 2011

posted 02-14-2016 04:27 PM

By "this" I guess you mean rfo-basic??

If so, then as far as I know the answer is both yes and no. rfo-basic has native support for sqlite databases since that's what is built into Android --the sqlite support library comes preinstalled on every device. I don't think you would be importing a mysql database directly onto the handset or tablet (would you?) so what you're talking about is merely accessing that data from a remote server.

You can easily pull or push it with a request over the network. If it was me, I would probably do something with Perl on the server side if it's easy, or qdecoder if it's complicated (simply because I know a lot more C than Perl so it requires less research to figure out how I'll do it), then just construct queries in the rfo-basic program and blast 'em over the server, the read the results and take action accordingly.

You can actually see a working example of this sort of cgi interaction with a webserver via a perl script in my app. Look at the section for signing up for the mailing list and you'll see a query being constructed to be sent to FormMail.pl on my webserver after the user enters his information.

I'm not sure that I've actually answered the question that you asked, though...

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Marcel Birgelen
Film God

Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012

posted 02-14-2016 04:47 PM

quote: Bobby Henderson
I really hate what has become of web sites lately. Any sense of proper graphic design is just plain dead with these things. Mobile is all to blame for it.

While I'm not the biggest fan of this "responsive design" fad, a website for a movie theater is probably one of the exceptions where "responsive" (or I'd rather call it Device Adaptive) design could actually add something.

People hanging out together deciding what to do tonight will end up checking your site on their mobile phone and most likely not on a notebook or desktop and you don't want to frustrate them with a design that only works by pinch-zooming and panning it all over the place.

Obviously, the best way to roll would be creating a separate page for your mobile device, but then you also have to maintain two different pages.

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Justin Hamaker
Film God

Posts: 2253
From: Lakeport, CA USA
Registered: Jan 2004

posted 02-14-2016 04:51 PM

You have answered my question indirectly. It primarily confirms that app development is well beyond my current programming skills. I wouldn't mind taking the time to learn what I needed if I had other purposes, but it seems like a lot for a single application, especially when I have a very functional mobile web site already.

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Frank Cox
Film God

Posts: 2234
From: Melville Saskatchewan Canada
Registered: Apr 2011

posted 02-14-2016 04:59 PM

You're over-complicating it if your objective is simply to provide an app that tells people what's playing.

Remember what I said earlier in this thread about creating a static webpage and caching it? Do that for your app. Write a little program using your favourite language that will query your database server and write a html file named something.html. Tell your app to fetch something.html when someone requests the information through the app. Run the program to create the static page every time you update your program listings, or automate it with a cron job and update the static page every day/hour/minute/whatever you want.

Then the app has nothing to do other than fetch a static webpage. Feel free to use mine for a pattern if you want.

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