Topic: Please give some feedback

I hesitate somewhat to do this since I know I will get my head chopped off, more or less....

Anyway, I made a site (in Swedish again of course!) for a Dance school company. So far it is on a test address: http://www.malmo.bostream.se/richcris/studioone/

They want it simple, with the pale blue colours that it kinda has now. Simple = cheap, updates twice a year, easy to navigate, no cgis etc. It will be used by people who are interested in becoming dance students, and those who are already students at the school.

I have rebuilt the site from nested tables into CSS. Also validated all pages without any errors.

One of the pages is in English, Site info. I have a question here. Is it cheesy to put out all this information? The customer hasn't seen this Site info page yet and hasn't told me whether she likes it or not, so I don't know if I should keep it. Is there any of the information at this page that is totally unnecessary if I keep the page?

Well folks, start raping my work!

Kasta sten i glashus? Jag?

*chops head off*

huh huh, huh. cool.

Yeah, that site info page is something you would wanna post here, I doubt they visitors would be much interested

It's nice and simple, I can definitely appreciate that, but an accent color would liven it up quite a lot, and I would seriously consider it for the links if nothing else. All that same colored text staring me in the face puts me in zombie mode. Then I remembered you wanted advice so I started looking for links =) I found some, they're the bold ones, sometimes.

The links in the schema page that jump to the 'bookmarked' bios are not a terribly good idea, depending on resolution and the bio's position on the page, it may or may not end up at the top of the page and that confuses even me, experienced web surfah extraordinairre, at times. Put a border on them there headshots, something. I know the bios are small but maybe you could manage a page for each if you got creative.

I would also get rid of the 2 vertical running gradients and put a sharper line in in their place, and clean the aggies up on the dancer so (s)he's crisper on the edges. Looks like you were going for that trendy traced bitmap effect but didn't quite make it. The NO1 Dance Studio graphic is pretty static filled as well.

Those simple things would go a long way to making me happier, but who am I? I mean really?

Jason

grrr, lotta typos

[This message has been edited by JKMabry (edited 07-06-2003).]

*wipes sweat from forehead* Woah, my head is still there!

Thanks Jason! I certainly agree with most of what you are saying.

You say the links are "the bold ones, sometimes". Does that mean you found any links that weren't bold? And you are right about that the colour would need some kind of accent. I have "accented" it way over what the client wanted already (plain blue with black text), and they are quite happy about it so far. Maybe I should put in a red-like colour for links instead of just making them bold? It is actually confusing that some text is bold almost the same way as the links are. Any other suggestions?

Yep, you're right about the linking to the teacher's page. I think it is too little of content for each teacher to make a page for each of them, so I think I will simply remove the anchors and link to the top of the teacher's page instead. Thanks for that. I have actually thought of it before, but wasn't sure.

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Looks like you were going for that trendy traced bitmap effect but didn't quite make it.

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Well I don't know anything about the trendy traced bitmap effect you are referring to, but those colour tonings have become a thing on my sites. I just have to "tone in" all the sites I make somehow. "All" pages on the net have lines and squares. It's clean and neat, but I guess the reason to why I want gradients is to make it softer. A female thing, I guess... But I will give the dancer picture a try to make the edges crispier. Had it that way from the start, but it looked kinda nasty. Will try again, though. The old nested table version of the site has some of those ingredients: http://www.malmo.bostream.se/richcris/studioonegamla/

quote:

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The NO1 Dance Studio graphic is pretty static filled as well.

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Yep, you're right. It's their logo, though. Both the dancer and the NO.1 are their logos, so I can't do much about them really. When you say static filled, do you mean it would be cool to make it a little 3D-ish?

By the way, go to the teacher's page (Lärare) and click on the link next to the teacher called Rigoberto. There you will see an example of great web design! *shivers* The link is here too: http://www.salsa-latina.com/ That is an example of what my client has to compare with...

Kasta sten i glashus? Jag?

[This message has been edited by Kartis Shone (edited 07-06-2003).]

yeah, me and a friend were laughing over that salsa site a few hours ago. Suave. If that's the measuring stick they're judging you by, take the money and run

the bold sometimes, I meant sometime bold text is not a link, it's just bold, confused? heh.

by staticy I meant lossy almost, like jpeg artifacts, and/or gif jagginess. Terrible combo. As for it being 'their' logo, you can clean it up right?

The trace bitmap thing can be seen all over these guys' sites - WARNING, browser window jacking in the extreme. Their edges are smoother, your edges are diffused.

Do NOT use red as an accent color here =)

Jason

Still haven't changed anything, since I have been working on my own site for a while. I will be back for you to review that one too eventually. So pictures and links are still the same at the Dance-site...

Any other feedback? I only have my hubby to say "good" or "bad" about sites I make, so I need some comments from others as well.

One thing I have had trouble with is the different rendering in Netscape/Mozilla/Konqueror compared to Explorer/Opera. Take a look at the block where the link "Konstnärlig ledare" is. Looks great in IE and Opera, in my opinion. Stinks in the Mozilla-browsers. It seems Mozilla-browsers render text wider and taller than others. The background-image in the block is 18px wide, the block is told to be 20px with 1px border, font-size is 11px. I have already made the font-size smaller, and think it will be too small if I lower it even more. The same problem made ALL blocks wider on the site, which made text and pictures overlap in the Mozillas, so all text blocks has been made less wide as well.

In the reference book I have I can't find much about this issue except the em-value. Should I use line-height with ex-value, and/or letter-spacing and line-height? I guess this would probably make the text too narrow in IE/Opera.

Does anyone in the Asylum know any other or better solution for the text to render the same in IE and the Mozillas?

Kasta sten i glashus? Jag?