Topic: The best sites ever

I have 2 sites that I would be interested in getting feedback about.
http://all.at/archtheos
My homepage. A combination humor/artwork site.
http://hey.to/bigneatguy
A project me and a few others are working on. Not currently a lot of content on it.

I look foward to hearing opinions (constructive criticism and blatant remarks of disgust are both acceptable).
--P'84

I'll just go with the first site for now...

My first thought was "Ow, Ow! My eyes!" Blue text on a black background? Needless to say, I did not stick around to read the text on that first page. I clicked through as quick as I could to get away from it. I also religiously avoided all pages within the site that used this color scheme.

Other than that, I'm not really sure what to say. You don't have a distinguishable link color, which is not good. The navigation is also quite confusing, with two sets of links up at the top. Most of the first page is also occupied by that graphic and blank space, so I need to scroll down to see anything.

Sorry for the brevity. I've got to admit, I'm just wiped out after that review of gilshafir's site.

As for the thread title... definitely not the best sites ever.

Most of your problems seemed to be your monitor settings, but I will consider revising it. The black/blue text scheme will probably be changed to a black/white one. Perhaps grey for the links.

As for the navigation, I don't see your problem with it. It's a basic frame setup. Explain your disatisfaction and I will revise it.

Oh yeah and sorry about your eyes. I will pay any optomitrist bills caused by my site.
--P'84

--P'84

I tried to view the first page, but all I got was a long intro with some scrolling text and no 'skip intro'-button. Since I personaly despice intro's I left the page. If you add a 'skip intro'-button I'll crit the rest of the page for you...

The second page wasn't anything special in my opinion. It has a totally useless splash page which should be removed. For those viewing the page without a Flash plugin installed the page will not have any meaning since the whole site is Flash. This should be changed. Every page you make should be viewable by people not using Flash, therefore navigation and content should not be made using Flash. It would also be nice if you had some information on this page. Right now it is only a portal to the two other sites with no information about why they belong together or why the visitor should go to those pages.

_________________________
"There are 10 kinds of people; those who know binary, those who don't and those who start counting at zero"

Um, I don't quite see how most of the problems are my monitor settings. Blue on black is a horrible choice no matter what your monitor settings may be. And the link color is the same as the text color. How are my monitor settings going to fix that?

What bothers me about the navigation? Well, basically the fact that it is split up into two rows, one on the top left and one on the bottom right. I just don't understand why. That and the fact that it is frames--I'm just not a big fan of frames (and it doesn't look to pretty with the variety of backgrounds you have on the different content pages). Just because I don't like it doesn't mean you should revise it, though. If it were my site, I would go a totally different route. But it's not my site.

By the way, I detest your new splash page. At least with the old one I could click away from it quickly, but now you are forcing visitors to sit through a slow scrolling, self-aggrandizing speech? Which brings me to another point. I understand that this extreme arrogance may be your site "persona," but I find it to be an incredible turn off. Couple this arrogance with your spelling mistakes, and it makes you look like a thirteen year old kid. If I had been visiting your site as a regular visitor (ie, not as a reviewer), I would have been gone after about two seconds of that intro (with no way to skip it). Even if I had made it inside, the forum would have been enough to send me on my way.

This is just me, and not everyone is like me (thank God). But you might want to consider what sort of impact your persona will have on site visitors.

Actually Suho, Blue on black might be quite clear to him and I'm not talking about the monitor settings.

I've had a very similar thing come up with a friend of mine. He too was writing a webpage and had a manu bar that was pure black #000000 with pure blue text #0000FF. My other housemate and I had serious problems trying to read the text, even on a nice bright LCD screen but to him it was quite clear. He could read the text from twice the distance away from the computer screen that we could.

Anyways, to cut a shortish story even shorter, we got a bunch of other people to look at it and they all found it difficult to read bar a couple, one of which was colour blind. Guess what?... my friend discovered that he was actually slightly colour blind too. Nothing too major (at least he didn't have to hand back his drivers licence) but enough to make that blue appear just that little bit brighter than it would to most of us (I think he was classed as being slightly red-blue colour blind). There are theories that almost all of us are marginally colour blind, although it's so slight that we'll never actually notice though.

Having said that, I must agree that blue on black = all bad.


As for the rest?... eh. With a topic title like "The best sites ever" all I can really do is agree and smile inwardly.

That's a good point, Drac. I never thought of that...

If you're going to have a splash screen, I say lose the play button and have it start right away. Why make users have to do an unnecessary click?
Also scroll the text a little faster.
(But since I've seen more than one person advise against splash screens, I would never use one unless a client wanted me too.)

As for the "extreme arrogance", it doesn't bother me for a personal website. To me it's just humorous.

About the menu problem at the top: When you click "Artwork", a new menu appears
but the content stays the same (until you click another link), so the menu no longer matches the content.
One example to help illustrate the problem: At this point, lower on the main page it says to click the "PhotoShop" button on the menu above. But there is no longer a Photoshop button on the menu above.
(The navigation is okay once you get used to it, but cornfusing at first.)

This concludes my proposal. Thank you for your attention. :-)

(By the way, referring to you Rants section, the word used for the opposite of winner is "loser", not "looser".)

TheDude