Topic: Local Residents Association

Round where I live there's a group which looks at planning applications, reducing crime etc. and they asked me to make a website for them. Considering that a lot of the people viewing the site will not be experienced internet users I tried to make it fairly simple. I'm not so sure I like the result though. So I'd largely like to hear about whether the site works visually for you.

The main page is http://www.parazone.net
Another page that you might want to look at is http://www.parazone.net/aboutsite.php

Everything else is nowhere near finished.

When I first clicked the link the very first thing that caught my eye were the appearance buttons. They seem to be inordinantly large. IMHO you should maybe move those to the bottom where they are less conspicuous.

The rest of the buttons could use a little padding. They seem crowded right now.

Crap, gotta run. I'll come back later...

:::11oh1:::

The header (both the text and the image) seem exceedingly large. I'm at work, on 800x600, and they take up almost half of my available screen size...

The nav buttons on the left seem to have some confused formats. It appears that there are two boxes there, with the background color and text in one, and the border on the other. In Mozilla, the one box does not fit inside the other, leaving things rather odd looking (especially since the bottom button is down past the bottom of the red background.....).

There is no need for two boxes there....apply all of the visual styles to the <a>, and format the <li> only in regard to list-style, margin, padding, etc.

Also, as a side note, if you specify the font-family for the body, you don't have to specify it for each individual element (one exception being <td>'s...).

{edit - and just to be nitpicky -

quote:

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Email usually works pretty good.

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So does proper grammar That should read "Email usually works pretty well."

=)



[This message has been edited by DL-44 (edited 09-30-2003).]

I agree that the header is too big. Shrink it down a little and maybe reduce the line-height, so that there's not so much white-space between the word "The" and "ParaZone."

Agree with what has been said before, but got something more to add as well...

You should run the site through the w3c validator, you got a couple of errors that can be easily fixed.

The content should expand more on the right. As it is now a lot of space is left unused there and it makes the page seem kind of 'empty'.

Your menu should have the little feature that the link leading to the page the user is currently on, should not be a link and it should be formated differently from the other links. Biggest reason for this is that it is not a link considering that it doesn't take the user anywhere, and it will make it easier for the user to see where he is on your page.



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

Thanks for your inputs, I think I've implemented most of what you said. Venificuz, your suggestion about disabling links is something I'll probably do when I have more time, everything else was simple css tinkering. I've reduced the size of the header, but the size of the image quite compromises how much I can play with that.

DL-44 - You weren't supposed to be looking at that page...

Veni - happy and valid again

Anything else?

quote:

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but the size of the image quite compromises how much I can play with that.

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how so? the image can be resized....

Anyway, definately looking better all in all.

I find it unusual that your site offers a JavaScript text-resizing widget, even though your font sizes are specified in percentages already. Generally, this is used on sites that set their font sizes in pixels, and then include the widget to compensate for IE6 users. If IE6 users can resize the text anyways, I wouldn't go through the trouble of setting it up.