Topic: Site I Made

I probably shouldnt show this to people right away as it isnt finished. Its a site I making for a small company. I dont want to knwo about the content but Critisim on the design would be much appreciated.
Doesnt work in NS4 .. yet.

This is meant to be irishy overkill

wooow
pretty nice dhtml you got here
respect!

-THE SPACE-

I'm not going to give a full critique of the site, just a few points I noticed browsing over it, without looking at code or anything. First up the quality of the images round the page really isn't good, and it would be well worth sacrificing loading time to improve them in my opinion. The other thing is your scroller, the buttons look sort of XP like, and not very irish like. Format them like the text in the title perhaps. One other thing I can imagine other people picking up on is the fact that, especially on 1024x768+ it doesn't use a lot of the screen space. But as far as I'm concerned it isn't a mojor issue, and works as an integral part of the site's theme. Resisting comment on content. Good work.

"i miss me,
i miss everything i'll never be"

Hugh: I agree with quisja about the image quality - everything seems fine on the loading for me but I suppose as everything is loaded once you could stick in a little preloader and increase the quality of the graphics - they look jaggy and have artefacts and things.

Other than that it looks and works really nicely -my only concern is that the scroller isn't intuitive (i.e. it doesn't work as we might expect sscrollrs to) as the buttons have more of a page up/page down function and that was a little suprising and doesn't make smooth reading easy as wih ordinary scrolling then you tend to mark where you are up to with your eyes and then scroll on a bit - this way you have to find your place again. You could have a << < > >> feature so you could keep the page up/down and add scrolling in too.

Anyway this looks really good and is a great concept - let us know when you have the full working model let us know and we'll give you a full review.

___________________
Emps

FAQs: Emperor

I agree with Emps on the non-intuitive scrolling. I would also recommend disabling links for the current "page," and possibly marking (highlighting) them in some way (ie, when you're on the home page you shouldn't be able to click the "home" link, etc.)

I'll be honest with you, I also find the movement of the pages to be a little unnatural. Why do they go down instead of just straight across? It just strikes me as a bit odd, that's all, and it's mostly a matter of personal preference, I guess.

Yea, your right with the scroller I was afraid of that. It doesnt work in Netscape, so I think Im gonna try for a better scroller.

What did you think of the page left right idea ?

I was thinking of having the border images loading twice, first time crap qual and then high quality after a few seconds while the page loading is idle.

Looks like a lot of unnecessary DHTML that will probably just confuse (and alienate) visitors. I recommend that, if you must have a scrolling box, that you use a div with overflow:auto, so that at least users get the scrollbars they're used to.

They told me they wanted something more like: http://www.irishclub.org/calendar.htm

wtf ?

ewwwwww!



..
~Existence is a mere pattern.~

lol, Looks like we might be getting into one of those times where ya gotta say "I'm the designer. I know what I'm doing." . . . Well, maybe more eloquently. But. . . ya your design is quite a bit better than that other. . . site. . .

Hm, debate time
Is the client always right?
Is the designer always right?


Answer: None of the above

I agree that the calendar-example is in no way beautiful, however, there are differences between your proposal and that example that goes beyond the visual design.
Information structure and conveyed message to the users.

While your site is more interesting (and possibly more confusing) to the user, the calendar-example presents more information in a more traditional way on the first page than yours does, thus immediatley shows the user what it's all about. Your design is actually more about the site than the message.
(of course there is a line that you should not cross as they did, the line between enough information and way too much...)

If I understand you proposal correctly, the site actually is about selling a piece of Ireland (as in property/land), right?
Then that's what you have to show the users in the visual design, presented in a way that the client can feel comfortable with. Like it or not, if the client uses a site as an example, you should bring in elements of that example in your proposal to satisfy the client. Just sit down and take a good look at the example site and try not to get hanged up on the bad aspects of it, try to find out what it is that the client finds appealing.

Keep in mind here that it's the client and their customers that you need to satisfy, not us or yourself...
Also clients and average joe users tend to be less "shopping inspired" in a site with ton's of flashy elements than in clean, trustworthy fast and modern sites.
Anybody remember www.boo.com ... They "flashed" themself to the death.

The key to any venture that want's people to part from their hard earned cash is to be trustworthy, give them privacy policies, links to info about how their creditcard info will be handled, all that stuff, it's boring but important!

Take a step back and re-evaluate what your mission with the site really is about and forget the visual parts until you have the rest down, the visual parts should really only be decoration on a business site.

Cheers/Dan

{cell 260}
-{ a vibration is a movement that doesn't know which way to go }-