Topic: New site: teamEarth (Page 1 of 1)

Hello,

Any suggestions or what-not would be helpful.
This is the first site I ever made.

teamEarth

Cell 816

Its realy obvious this is your first ever website, instead of crushing it for some of its bad design features, i will instead give you a few pointers, try looking at this website Linkdup for inspiration, i think it will gove you some direction on what road the "modern" design is taking, i would then suggest starting again.

Oh and be prepared to be told about how useless splash pages are.

Inflatable fire Vrs Deflatable Water

Now now, Narcosis that was overly harsh for someone's first try.

We all start somewhere, and I'm of the faith that any deisgn has merit, it's just really hard to find sometimes. Besides, I doubt Gilbert has the resources profesional designers have. Not everyone has the money for high end image editing programs and the like.

This site has a classic case of "Too much, too soon". And the first steps to rectifying the problems is to start cutting it back.

The splash page is useless. So remove that.

Then ditch all of the mouseovers. We can come back to them later but lets stick to simple text links for now. The only image you should need is one for the logo and Maybe one for the site title "Team Earth". How about a non-animated one. Simple, clear, concise.

The site and the information it presents the user with is again, quite simple in nature, so lets keep the design nice and simple. One menu that displays all of the different content areas that appears on each page at the same location. THen you'll also need a standard place to put sub section links. Like a link to all of the documents in the "documents" section, a link for each page in the "Information" section and so on.

Maybe you should think about re-structuring the layout so you've got an "Across the Top" menu for the main content links and a "Down the left hand side" menu for sub links. But whatever you decide you should try and keep it the same throughout each page.

Repeating the main content links along the botom of the page is a good idea so keep that bit in. Standardise your font sizes and font weights across all of the pages. Some pages are completly bold, other aren't.

Once you've got all of that done and you've "cut back" on a lot of the un needed elements in the page then you can start thinking about ways to "enhance" the design with rollovers and such without destroying the simplicity and easy of use that you've already built.

OK, I have to start off by saying that I found the following to be very funny...

Narcosis: "Oh and be prepared to be told about how useless splash pages are."

Dracusis: "The splash page is useless. So remove that."

It's not often that I laugh at site reviews, but that was amusing.

Well, Drac made a lot of good points, so I'll just stick to a few. He advised you to get rid of the mouseovers, which I agree with, but I thought I'd expand a bit on the reasoning. You see, when the visitor first enters the page, all they see are a bunch of black buttons (or black pills if they're from the Asylum, which could be dangerous). These give the visitor no idea where they lead until you mouse over them. This is not good design in terms of usability: I should immediately be able to see all of my options and understand where links/buttons/etc. are going to take me. I come to a page like this to get information, not to guess at which button does what.

Especially on the "info" page, I would try to get away from wall-to-wall text. Longer lines of text are more difficult to read, especially when there are no margins. Try to go for shorter lines of text, and make sure you've got sufficient margins. One way to do this would be to put the menu on the left rather than the top, but that's a personal choice. The top menu isn't all that bad.

It's a noble effort for a first try, and a noble cause. I wish you luck as you continue to develop the site.




Cell 270

I don't have much more to add, since the advice allready given covers the important points. But to add a few (one) point I would recommend that you remove those eyes on the 'copyright page'. They were nicely done, by got pretty irritating after while.

Keep up the good work, you've got enough content to put out there and from what I saw it was good content as well. That is a very good beginning and makes designing/making the site easier.

_________________________
Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch.
- copied from the wall of cell 408 -

Thanks you guys.

I am working now on making the paragraphs narrower, for easier reading, but I was wondering how I get the first line of a paragraph to indent?

And fixing some other stuff.


teamEarth ~~ Cell 816

The 'Indented paragraphs tutorial' should cover that: http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/ . The other tuts on that site might be of some help as well...

_________________________
Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch.
- copied from the wall of cell 408 -

Thanks Veneficuz

So far I have fixed the text pages, making them narrower. I put a link list on my first page.

I know you guys don't like the splash screen, but I sort of like it, sorry...

Um, yea.. I also like the buttons, it makes my page different from normal sites, and since their are options to get to the same places in the box on the right, I figured it was Ok. And I don't want people to read the second info page before they read the first info page, so I don't see why I should put links to the second & 3rd info pages on my main page? I tried to standardize the fonts better, I hope that everything looks Ok.

I also slowed the movement of the eyes on the copyright page, so they don't interfere when you try and click on the links. I know their annoying, Veneficuz, but thats kind of the point.

teamEarth ~~ Cell 816

[This message has been edited by Gilbert Nolander (edited 10-24-2002).]

I was wondering if someone with Netscape could take a look at my documents and make sure they are narrow and centered for me.

Thanks.
http://www.eccentrix.com/members/teamearth/Documents.html

teamEarth ~~ Cell 816

I don't use Netscape, but Mozilla is about the same. The text comes out 'centered and with a margin on all sides. Probably what you want

But it think it would have been easier and cleaner if you had used CSS and <div>s instead of tables...

_________________________
Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch.
- copied from the wall of cell 408 -

Thanks,

I thought tables would be the best since you can set the width. I guess you can set the width of div's also?

<div width="770">

teamEarth ~~ Cell 816

yes, but the prefered way to set width etc for a div is to use style sheets.

in the head section:

<style type="text/css">

.content{ width: 770px;

                align: center;

                background: #acacac;

                etc. }

</style>

and in the body:

<div class="content">

blah blah blah

</div>

_________________________
Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch.
- copied from the wall of cell 408 -

Actually, I would recommend a separate style sheet, rather than an inline one. If you're new to CSS, though, you might want to check out what the FAQ has to say--there are a ton of tuts/resources there. Just type "CSS" in the search field and see what comes up.

Um, yea. Thanks for the info. But as long as everything is working Ok, I don't think i'm going to change anything.

Thanks though.

teamEarth ~~ Cell 816

Heh. I can understand that. Just keep the FAQ in mind when you decide you're ready to delve a little deeper.

[Edit: Grammar. ouch.]

[This message has been edited by Suho1004 (edited 11-01-2002).]

Cool.


teamEarth ~~ Cell 816

[This message has been edited by Gilbert Nolander (edited 11-06-2002).]

Hello, I fixed my site up a bunch. Mainly changed colors of text and made some other changes. If anyone feels like fixing up my image of the earth in their free time, have it. I tried forever, but I only have paint. Or if someone wants to make me a fancy earth image, ummm...Happy me. I would give you credit at the bottom of my homepage and everything.

Cool.

teamEarth

ok... i haven't read the other reviews, but apparently you've made changes, so hopefully i won't be duplicating too much.

if you're going to have a splash page, make it a good one. make 'teamEarth' a decent font. lose the stalled bits on the animation.
...but first of all - tell me, what for the love of all things jaggy is the point of it? because right now, all it seems to be doing is abusing bandwidth.

navigators/menus are to help people navigate. suprise suprise, yours do not. at all. if you're going to have a picture > text rollover, at least have different pictures for each icon, so people can make some sort of association... for example a picture of a home for home, a "?" for info... etc etc etc

your site also has an incredibly poor use of screen space. 3 sets of navigators, linking to the same area.... kinda seems a little redundant, ya? makes me think you could get rid of the rando-buttons altogether.

for the amount of information you have on your site, there's no reason why i should have to scroll to read it all... why can't the picture of the world be smaller, and next to the 'teamearth' title? then, if you chop out all the 'mystery link' icons, that will chop the vertical space in half...

your colours, although a tad bland, work really well together. the mystery links really don't fit in, for this reason also.

my only other suggestion for now is to look at using a 'nicer' font... like a sans serif.

...and congratulations on your engagement earlier this year!

Thanks for the info. Reitsma. I will see what I can do.

Ok, Just click on my sig. I have updated my page....

[This message has been edited by Gilbert Nolander (edited 11-19-2002).]

Hello,

I am trying something out with link roll-over's, trying to learn some new stuff....

I was wondering what ya' think about the colors and what-not...
http://www.eccentrix.com/members/teamearth/teamEarth-test.html

Cell 816~teamEarth~Asylum Quotes

[This message has been edited by Gilbert Nolander (edited 01-13-2003).]

Good to see you're still working on the site.

I've got to be honest with you... the rollovers at the top don't thrill me. I don't really see the point. In fact, I don't see why you can't make the links text and then let CSS handle the rollovers. It would be a lot easier and probably a lot prettier that way. As it is, the graphic text up there looks horrible. If you do want to stick with the graphical rollovers, though, may I suggest that you make the images .GIF instead of .JPG? There's no reason they can't be .GIF, and making them .JPG just introduces those fuzzy compression artifacts. This goes for all the images on that page, by the way--you should even be able to make those earth images .GIF.

The content is not bad, and I really think the CSS rollovers look a lot nicer than the graphical ones. Still not sure about the counter--it's just kind of sitting out there with no real indication of what it is. Sure, most people will be abe to figure out it's a counter, but if you're going to use it you might want to include the standard "XXX people have visited this site since..." Personally, I never saw the point in counters, but that's just a matter of opinion.

The colors are not bad--very earthy, actually. It looks to me, though, like all your colors are different shades of the same base color, or at least very similar colors (the link text is hue 15, while the body text is hue 0). You might want to consider a blue in there as an accent color--that would also go with the earth images you have up there. This is just an idea, and I'm not sure if it would work out, but you might want to give it a try.

That's everything I was also thinking of doing....

Insteresting.

I even saw a commercial last night that used a blue background with the same color texts that I use on my page and it got me thinking. Interesting.

Thanks for the input...

I am sort of busy at work, but I will see what I can do.


Cell 816~teamEarth~Asylum Quotes

Ok, I found some free time and fixed it up nicely for you guys....

Now what do you think...
http://www.eccentrix.com/members/teamearth/teamEarth-test.html

Ah, much better. The only thing I might recommend is making the hover color a bit more distinguishable from the link color. As it is, the two are very dark, and it doesn't stand out as much. Then again, it's not hurting anything, so if that's the way you want it, go with it. My only concern would be that you might be introducing too many different colors--you could always go for a lighter shade of green as the hover.

Woohoo!

That's a big improvement from the first time I looked at your site. Well done.

Although I do have one major gripe about it, you?re centring just about everything! Why?... I can understand you centring the overall page but why centre each paragraph?... You see, text is a lot easier to read if we have a set point to start from for each line. If you centre it not only does it look kinda ugly and disjointed but it's also a lot harder to read. If you ~must~ centre something then try and limit it to headings or quotes and such no longer than 1 line long, 2 at the absolute most.

For example, if you were to un-centre the "news" section and place all of the dates at the end of the news link then it'll look much much better, not to mention be a lot easier to navagate. Another example would be comparing the readability of your "site map" page to a links page from one of my old sites, http://www.whatever.net.au/~cameron/blueleaf/links.php -- Having a solid left margin for the text to rest against helps a lot.

p.s. Us down under folk spell it "centre" so live with it.

Thanks you guys..

I should have all the changes done to all my pages in a few days...

I made some minor color changes and decided to get rid of the earth image all together,
I just thought it looked nicer.
http://www.eccentrix.com/members/teamearth/teamEarth-test.html

[This message has been edited by Gilbert Nolander (edited 01-15-2003).]

I'm quite the amateur myself, but I've been following this thread and I must say you've made quite an improvement from the beginning.

Perhaps these are unhelpful comments, but two things I wonder about the site:

Why couldn't you use a background color as opposed to the image you have currently? Is there any specific reason?

and...

It seems just a little bit to wide. Is anyone else getting a horizontal scrollbar? The content seems to be exactly 800 pixels but there are little margins on either side. Perhaps size the table down a couple pixels?


Or maybe it's just my comp. Nice work in any case.



-Chesta

Thanks for the info. I will try it out.

The reason I use an image for the background is so if I ever want to change the background, I can just change the color of the image, and I also have invisible links which is just the background image set as a link, so you can't see it. I know it's kind of cheesy, but i like it. I will look into shrinking the table width. I have a huge monitor, so it seems fine to me, but thanks. Also, I changed my page again... I think I like this one a lot..
http://www.eccentrix.com/members/teamearth/teamEarth-test.html

Just to let ya know, I have finally updated my webpage, and all the pages are fixed up to look like they should, with the new style, so just click on my sig. and it should take you there...

Cell 816~teamEarth~Asylum Quotes

[This message has been edited by Gilbert Nolander (edited 01-17-2003).]

You're definitely getting there, GN. I've got to agree with Chesta, though--I really don't see the point in using the background image. If you really want to make it so that you can change the background color in one fell swoop, define it as an external style, and then apply that style to all your pages.