Topic: too simple this time?

well, my site, www.thespacebetweenus.com has got a new design now, but i think i made it a bit too simple this time.
i think the main "problem" are the graphics because i can't make special ones because of the stylesheet selector.
any comments? suggestions for improvements?

elysiumart

Two ultra-quick points:

1. No-one really actually likes those W3C buttons. There are plenty of lovelies on the internet.
2. It is perfectly possible to change the images with the stylesheet, if you have them set as the background of a div or other container. Hopefully you can go for different header graphics or at least lose the jaggies. Alternatively see A List Apart for cross browser PNG.

ah yes i have also just thought of the possibility with background in divs - i will do that
you know these jaggies are because of the transparacy
thanks for the advice anyway.

hehe Yeah, no one gives a crap about your code being W3C compliant.

And whatever the excuse is for the jaggies they need to go.

Your menu is nifty although most people are used to it dropping down when you mouseover so it could be confusing for a tick. I the History option takes up two lines which is kinda annoying. I also don't like that the Siggies link opens in another window; I'll hold down shift and click it if I want it to do that.

And I really hate your links page because, well, I'm not on it.

As for too simple? Nah, I love the clean cut design.

:::krets.net:::

gimme a brief decsription of your page and you are up man
yes the jaggies will go, i promise
and the w3c button.....okay...okay.....its gonna be removed..

Yeah, those aliased gifs have to go. As for a description of Krets? page... dude, click the link in his sig.

Anyways, I'd use PNG images instead of different image files as background images. You'll probably save space with PNG's.

The overall visual design is nice, as are the different styles although if your going to have different styles, you have the ability to play with it more. As it currently stands the colours and tonal values of each style are very similar. Mix it up a bit; light, dark, contrast, and saturation... their all yours to play with now. You users will choose whatever appeals to them. Suho's styles are a good example of this, each style sheet had a very different feeling, yours just seem to alter the colour, but ultimately, it?s your site so that's up to you.

I think the way the menu works is fine. It functions just like a windows file menu although many web savvy users will feel more comfy with the mouseOver triggering the expanded menu. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, but I'd say you should set it up for the kind of people who would most often visit your site.

The text colours of the links in the menu are always blue on mouseOver. This doesn't always seem to gel with the colour scheme. I'd also like to see some kind of mouseOver highlight for the actual style change buttons, even if it's a simple cursor change to 'hand'. At the moment, it's hard to tell that their clickable at all. Also, a tooltip to expand on what that letter in the box means would be handy.

Whenever you're building custom interface elements you should always try and maintain any conventions like the 'hand' cursor for clickable elements.

Also, with the menu, the links only work when the mouse is over the text itself, to make it work for the entire area that the background colour covers set the links to dispkay:block, set their width to a static value the width of the menu and set a background colour for mouseOut (even if it's the same colour as the menu). This will cause the link hotspot to expand to fill the box that the background colour is in. Assuming your doing all of this with CSS at least... if your using tabels to layout the menus then I'm not sure how you'd fix that.

You should also try and maintain all of your interface elements across all states of the site, navigation elements are a given but since style switching elements effect the visual display globally they should be accessible globally as well.

Overall I think you?ve done a fantastic job. It?s very clean and very usable. Good stuff!

mas, I havn't actually hit your site before. This is a new experience for me. I quickly wanted to get the heck off the front page. Then I ran into your 'grey' interface. "Ahhhh" I said. I hadn't seen this before so it was nice to look at. For you it's old hat, but you had something going there. I looked around some more on your new design. It's clean like Drac said. I like the color changing option -- clever. But still I think you could do so much more.

This is a skewed critique from someone who hasn't been from your site before. I'm fresh out of the box. First impressions were: boring, square, too monochromatic, but I like whatever code you used for your dropdown menu, it worked unlike others that havn't recently (for unknown reasons).

On the bright side, this doesn't make you any less of a person. You're still awesome in my book. Your site just needs some elbow grease.

Shine and shine. :: [Cell=992] :: [See my team's 30 second animation!! ]

[This message has been edited by Bmud (edited 06-12-2003).]

oh thx a lot, bmud.
well, you may also check the history, then you can see a few past interfaces
yes, i am currently working on adding some details to the whole page. you may also press your refresh buttons, since i juts did a few changes on it.

elysiumart