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 :FAQ: for newcomers. I hope you have a pleasant stay at our institution.
Here are some thoughts on your site, in no particular order:
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 before 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 perfectly 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 exact same visual effect with CSS, and you would have cleaner and more semantically correct code, too. Check out A List Apart's Taming Lists 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?
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.
Suho got it all but I wanted to reiterate 2 points for maximum impact =)
Doubling the navigation is insane
The tad uninspiring design, especially yo jaggy melon in the upper left. That whole banner could use some pizzzazzz. Th links colors are adding to that drabness I think to, hard to come up with a good accent for grey tho Left align fixed width and plain white backgrounds give me the kitters in combination like that, could be the coffee though.
Now for the positivity, while it's plain, it's sharp and tight overall layout wise.
I'd love to see the rework, you sound like you enjoyed the good advice, show the tweaks, you've got my attention anyhow...
From: Den Haag: The Royal Residence Insane since: Jul 2000
posted 03-24-2003 19:16
At least you can stand critics...
That is a realy good point. I got a bit tired from people who wants us to comment and could not handle any critic.
Compliments for that.
About the design i have nothing to add right now.
"Freedom of speech is by no means freedom to insult others" from the Razorart goodbye letter.
From: there...no..there..... Insane since: May 2001
posted 03-24-2003 22:36
Not a bad site. I am not going to rehash the stuff that Suho said, but I did want to point out some stuff.
The body background-color? Go ahead and set it to the color on the outside. It looks funny with the background not being set to anything. Sometimes, I set the background color to something really funky and I hate it when the background of web pages are that color. Know what I mean?
The menu is cool. However, don't mess with my cursor. If it is a link, I would like to see the little hand.
There could be a little more on the front page. It seems a little thrown together right now. I would make your own links for the W3C stuff. Those buttons are hideous.
I have launched a slightly different version of the layout at the same address.
Here is a summary of the changes...
1) I did not have any source files to use for my picture on the banner, so I left it out.
2) I took a new picture to use as the banner that looks a little brighter (although I still didn't use any green).
3) I made my menu using css instead of a table with javascript.
4) I made my own versions of the W3C buttons.
You will note that I did not change to fluid css layout. My reasoning is that it looks worse at higher resolutions because my limited amout of content does not stretch well.
The content is still not done, and I have lots of work to do there (some of it was just copied from a previous version of my site).
If anyone still has time, I would appreciate more comments about the update. I apologize if it seems like I did not change veru much. I am stubborn that way .
That's a definite improvement. I especially like the title graphic. When you say you didn't use any green, though, does that mean you removed the green from the picture? Don't be afraid to use green (or red, for that matter). Your site colors are extremely neutral right now, so no matter what you have in that title graphic it's not going to clash. The livlier the better, I think (for example, I really like the #18 picture of the stream and the mountains--something lively like that). Good work on the menu, too.
I still get scrollbars at 800x600, though. If you're going to use a fixed layout, you might want to make it just a tad smaller, and center it on the page so it doesn't look so odd in higher resolutions.
It is, of course, up to you whether or not you want to use a fluid or fixed layout. If the content-stretching issue is the only thing stopping you, though, then I think you should give it a try. The content-stretching problem can be alleviated by the judicious use of whitespace, and perhaps a rearrangement of elements. Right now you are thinking in a fixed manner, but if you think in a fluid manner anything is possible. Yes, I know that's extremely cryptic and vague.
*sits cross-legged on the floor, presses palms together and chants, "Be the water, feel it flow around your soul..."*
Seriously, though, even if you do stick with the fixed layout, you might consider a little more padding for the content. As it is, you've got pretty much wall-to-wall text, and that's never a good thing. I once heard that the ideal reading length for a line was about 12-13 words (can't remember where I heard or read that, of course). I don't know if that's a hard an fast rule, but having to track from the ultimate right of the page all the way back to the left can be difficult. Give the words some room to breathe, and don't feel that you have to take up every bit of screen space with content.
Quite an improvement over the first version, though, both inside and out.
This is a peripheral note, but that font you're using in your title graphic -- I can't quite remember its name offhand, but I've been seeing it everywhere lately. (Sort of like Rubino Sans, another offender in the "is everywhere" department.) It's not a bad font, and it fits with the mountain range if you're going for a rustic feel, but I'd still be tempted to change it to something a little less, as they say, trendwhorish.
Ah, my bad... I'm using IE6, but I was testing 800x600 resolution with a favelet--and apparently this favelet resizes the window to 800x580. The twenty pixels less on the horizontal end is suppose to account for the scrollbar, I guess, but it doesn't really make sense to do it like that... I'll have to change that favelet.
[Edit: No, scratch that. I changed the favelet, but I'm still seeing a horizontal scrollbar (it appears until I expand the window to 807 pixels). I'll have to change my resolution to 800x600 and see what happens.]
[Edit2: OK, at 800x600 resolution there are no scroll bars (I had forgotten how huge 800x600 makes everything look!). It might be helpful to know that there will be a horizontal scrollbar in a 800x600 browser window, though. Or maybe not...]
[This message has been edited by Suho1004 (edited 03-27-2003).]
[This message has been edited by Suho1004 (edited 03-27-2003).]
posted 03-23-2003 19:48
Left align fixed width and plain white backgrounds give me the kitters in combination like that, could be the coffee though.