Topic: I've re-designed my site.

Hi all. I haven't been here in a while. I've been busy. I finally finished my re-design for my site and I'm looking for your thoughts. I've turned it into a kind of portfolio/blog site, but I'm sure that might change again down the road. I've tried to stick to an over all look and feel throughout and now need your thoughts on it. Thanks.

Here it is ---> www.mob68.com

Nice header image...

The rest of the site could use a lot of work though. I could tell without looking at the source that this was a table based design. The whole thing looks like a throwback to the mid 90's -- lots of conflicting colours, millions of border types all fighting for dominance in some rather un attractive ways and it appears no attention at all was paid to the typography.

Oh and what's the point of the front page if you don't provide any way to link back to it?

Advice? Aim for something simpler.

Minimise the ammount of colours and if you must use more than one sade of any colour, don't just vary the hue, unless you get downright funky with the colour minor hue shitfs will always make a design look tacky.

Oh and just because CSS lets you use different border styles does not mean you should, and that goes for anything really. Only use graphical treatments if you have a reason to do so. If you can't justify to yourself the need to use 4 different border styles on one page then just stick with the one style that best suits your overall treatments.

Speaking of colour, you might want to study up on colour and design. For starters, if your header contains only greys, you'll need to be very slective about the kinds and ammount of colours you use throughout the rest of your website. www.noahgrey.com is someone who uses a grey major colour scheme extreamly well IMHO.

Spend a couple of hours reading about typography. Know it, love it and for gods sake use it. It really will make a world of difference to your website.

Small fonts + Italics = Horribly hard to read.

A little bit of italic type here and there is good for emphasis, but right now it's overkill. Take Drac's advice and read up on typography. Not my favorite topic, personally, but you should get the basics down.

Color scheme: Third gray/blue color scheme in the Site Review forum today. I'm sensing a trend. This one's not to bad. Just add a bit more color to even it out.

Layout: I have not problems with it. Pretty well organized. Cut back on those thick borders. They don't look so good.

Your header graphic is nice, but I think it's a little over compressed. There's some visible artifacts in there. But then again, the image size is pretty large, and nobody likes to wait, so maybe that's the best you can do.


Nice redesign. Can I suggest adding a doctype? (Ya, I just had to throw that in... )




[This message has been edited by ozphactor (edited 07-22-2003).]

I have to agree with much of what has been said. A quick reiteration -

* Type - most of this page is rather hard to read.
* Color - there are too many conflicting colors. Try using the logo to set the color scheme, and go from there. The white hover on the links, over the pale grey background is very distracting.
* Borders - whoah! confusing. Again, too much - simplify.

In addition, there are a few issues that I feel need addressing. Some of these are not in reference to the visual design, but rather the undercarraige.

* Doctype - you need one. Of course, that also means choosing and sticking to a HTML version. I think it would be beneficial to go with a strict doctype, as it would help force you to clean up some of that code.
* CSS - it needs some help. There are some odd things in the CSS, and I think a more indepth study of the language would help a lot. The FAQ has some great CSS resources, and the Gurus Network has a very nice series of CSS tutorials.

Example -

"inset" and "outset" should not be combined on any element - the border is either inset, or it's outset. Such as "border: #000 1px inset".

*ID's - I notice you have an ID specified on all kinds of elements that don't need one for any reason, and in some cases, have inline styles specified for them as well. A big part of the purpose of the ID is to allow you to predefine stlye info in the style sheet.

*Code in general - You seem to have ar more tables than you need (in fact you really don't need tables at all for this layout), and you have way to much information specified in all of the <td> tags that is severely repititious, and probably makes your page's file size a 3 times more than it needs to be. You also have the dreaded <font> tag (also repeated far more than it could possibly be needed), which has been deprecated forever now. Again, further understanding of CSS will help eliminate your need for this.

So, to sum it up - I've certainly seen much worse, but it needs a lot of cleaning up both up front and underneath.

Back to the "simplfy" idea - it doesn't mean that you have to be boring, or dull, or any of that. It just means that you need to focus the presentation a little more narrowly, in order to get the point across. To much "stuff" and it's all lost in a jumble.

Back to the drawing board I go. LOL. The advice is priceless in this place. I'll be back with something I hope will be more pleasing all round. Thank you.