Topic: first portfolio site

so a friend and i after a few years working on and off together on projects, have finally gotten together a portfolio site in hopes of getting some paying jobs. we have two sites we're doing for crumbs and the clients are happy with what we have so far even though we are not quite as enthusiastic about what we've really got for them. we just reason, 'hey, it's for free, why redesign the whole damn thing when they like what's there so far?' so we compromise our 'pride' in a way i guess.
but enough bull, i just was looking for an over all critique on our portfolio site, tungstendesign.com . basically we're happy with the theme, ya know, kinda techy, but not sure about the best way to go about formatting with text and how to present the services we offer. we'd like the first page to really grab potential customer's attentions, but i don't think we should rely soley on the graphics to do that. so any feedback in general is welcome, but suggestions on content are what we're really looking for.

thanks to anyone willing to spend a little time on this,

~Sir_KiTree~Scan~
..::ill communications network::..

[This message has been edited by ~Sir_KiTree~ (edited 05-25-2003).]

quote:

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we'd like the first page to really grab potential customer's attentions

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Well, if I wasn't reviewing your site when you resized my browser window I would have closed the page a never returned. Ya might want to have a little think about that.

Resizing the browser window basically says that you can't design for the web so you force web browsers to fit your flawed design. Not a good thing for a design portfolio. Furthermore, the window size cut's off the bottom of your site. You'd be a lot better off if you designed the site to work in any size window and just left the browser window alone.


As for the visual style... Well, it's lacking. Nothing really seems to work together, the header image, the type treatments of the site title, the menu, the content area -- they all look like you selected some random Photoshop tutorial to use on that element without any thought as to how those elements would or could work together. The colour scheme is the same, conflicting hues of blue, greys and then red text links. This probably sounds rather harsh but a lot of the sites in your portfolio section demonstrate a more cohesive visual look than this site so I know you can do better.

The text layout could also do with some work. For starters, don't make everything bold, it just makes the text look cheap. Secondly, don't fully justify your paragraphs. Web browsers don't have the ability to hyphenate words and this tends to cause rivers of white space through the text. It's also been proven that fully justified text is slightly more difficult to read. Lastly, you should increase the line height of the text to make it look less compact and whilst making it easier to read.

As for the actual mark-up...

Big, bad, ugly and very Serious problems here. I checked the site in IE6, Netscape 7, Netscape 4 and Opera 7. The only browser it didn't break was IE6. If there's anything that'll turn your clients away faster than resizing their browser window it's breaking their web browser. Granted most people use IE6 but you'd be surprised how many clients will check your site in other browsers. Opera 7 and Netscape 7 didn't fair too badly but the text was huge causing extra scrollbars in the iFrame and it looks but ugly. Usually I don't worry about checking for Netscape 4 nowadays but since your completely neglecting the W3C's standards for HTML/XHTML I thought you might be aiming for NN4 compatibility, obviously I was wrong.


All in all, not a bad effort but if you honestly want to make money in this biz then you've got a lot of work ahead of you. You might also want to look into the W3C?s standards. www.w3.org ? Design for the future, not for the browser bugs.

Anyways, best of luck with it.

I agree with everything Drac said, so I won't repeat that.

One very good reason to not resize the browser window is that the user can disable the 'resize effect' in Mozilla (and probably Opera and Netscape as well), so that leaves the page looking really empty since only the top-left corner is used.

One thing that also could be improved on the menu is that the link to the page that the user is currently on, should not be a link since it will not take the user anywhere. This link should also be emphazised in some way (for example constant 'hover-effect') so the user knows which part of the page he is on.

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

Drac was spot on in his review, and dagnabbit, V stole my favorite pet peeve! Yes, you should definitely think about using the menu to help indicate where the user is in the site at any given time, especially since the individual pages don't have titles.

One more thing I'd like to add: I personally can't stand contact pages that contain mailto: links. In fact, to be honest with you, I can't stand mailto: links period. You click on a link, you expect to be taken to another web page. You don't generally expect to have your e-mail program opened up or (in my case) have your browser try to log you in to Hotmail. It could be argued that it is a contact link and this behavior might be expected, but I prefer to use contact forms. It allows the user to enter information quickly and simply, no hassle. It's a personal preference of course, but you might want to consider it.





www.liminality.org

Clean layout. I didn't have any browser issues, but then again I have my screen size set to microscopic. The term I want to use is surgical, it's the only thing I can think of. I personally like the layout of the main site, but it could do with some sprusing up.