Website Review — OZONE Asylum, home of the Mad Scientists

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Your Text: Insert Slimies » Insert UBB Code » Close Last Tag \| All Tags UBB Help	Well, Josh, allow me to begin by welcoming you to the Asylum! If you haven't seen it already, you might want to drop by our [url=http://faq.ozoneasylum.com/394] :FAQ:[/url] for newcomers. I hope you have a pleasant stay at our institution. Here are some thoughts on your site, in no particular order: [ulist] Believe it or not, but the first thing that struck me was the halo around your picture in the title bar. Since the title image is one single graphic (and not your picture overlayed on a background), there really is not reason for the halo. Most likely you cut the graphic out of a solid background color (after it was indexed) and then later applied the drop shadow to it and put it on top of the mountain background. Go back to the original picture, do another selection (make sure the marquee or lasso tool is anti-aliased) and then put it on top of the mountain background and apply any filters [i]before[/i] you try to flatten the image. The second thing I noticed was the size and positioning of the site. I am looking at it on a monitor set at 1024x768, and I'm getting a whole lot of white space to the right and at the bottom. I noticed your "optimized for" blurb and resized my browser window to 800x600--and then I got scrollbars! Granted, it doesn't scroll much, but if you're really going to aim for a single resolution, you should at least make sure it works [b]perfectly[/b] in that resolution. Incidentally, I don't recommend that route. I, myself, am a proponent of fluid design, and your site seems to be a good candidate for that. Your title image is obviously a fixed size, but there are ways around that (like centering the image). Anyway, if you are going to go the fixed-design route, I would recommend you at least check it out at other resolutions and make sure it doesn't look too bad. While I admire your committment to valid CSS and HTML, I am a bit puzzled by some of your design choices. Your menu, for example, is in a table. Why not make it an unordered list (since that what a menu is, semantically speaking) and then use CSS to style it. You could, achieve the [b]exact[/b] same visual effect with CSS, and you would have cleaner and more semantically correct code, too. Check out A List Apart's [url=http://www.alistapart.com/stories/taminglists/]Taming Lists[/url] for more info on this. Another offender in this area is your text. Why do you have your text in spans? That's what the <p> tags are for ;-). No reason to make extra work for yourself when XHTML already has the tools you need for the job. I'm afraid to say that I find the visual design itself to be a tad uninspiring--gray with blue links reminds me of the net about ten years ago. The title graphic has potential, but the contrast and colors have been reduced to the point of blandness. I'm guessing that you did this so the text would be readable, but you might want to think about how you can work a nice, colorful picture in. I know you have some beautiful mountains over there in Montana (My wife and I drove through Missoula on a trip around the States a few years ago--beautiful country up there), and you've got some nice shots in your pictures section. See what you can do to liven things up a bit. *I also just noticed that your text menu is duplicated on the left with the vertical menu. I didn't look too closely at that at first, but I assumed that it was something different. Why the duplication? [/ulist] Sorry if this review has been mostly negative. There are plenty of good points about your site, like the clean and valid code, the nice organization of information, etc. Hopefully the points I made will be of some help to you, and I wish you luck on this project. And keep the faith, brother. :) [img]http://www.liminality.org/asylum/suho1004.gif[/img] [url=http://www.liminality.org]www.liminality.org[/url] Loading...
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