Topic: My Page (Page 1 of 1)

Just started on this page, don't really know where to go with it? Any suggestions are welcome, www.angelfire.com/blues/sirglenn

Thanks Guys

Sir Glenn

Don't Sweat The Small Stuff!

[This message has been edited by Sir Glenn (edited 11-15-2003).]

Sorry, forgot to give the web address www.angelfire.com/blues/sirglenn

Don't Sweat The Small Stuff!

needing to have installed shockwave for a dull slpash screen is already bad :P

Look the main page's (no splash screen) menu position in Firebird (and i assume any other Gecko browser as well). Horribly misplaced. And while we talk of the main page, i hate that the menu elements are hidden, like if i want to go to tutorials i have to check almost every link to see which one is.

Onto tutorials You did not even classified them about what they were. I thought the push a button was a ps tutorial for example (regarding that, there are much better methods for a rollover, and you could have bothered to make a copy and paste block rather than forcing people to check the source code of the page). "Placing fonts " almost made me want to slam my head in my keyboard (why dont you put a "double-click" tutorial while we are on it?). Mouse follow does not work either on firebird. The only thing useful may have been the GTA3 cheats, but then again, there are better places about GTA3.

On the pics page you have a weird mix up of personal pics with misc pics (like madonna a britney kissing).

Okay, this may be irrelevant, but wtaching your guestbook filled with family posts is weirdo.

Since i have not seen any sort of "About this page" at all, i take this is just a personal site, right? then, what are these "productions" you talk about?!

For some reason i aint able see source code in firebird, so i cannot say anything code-wise (and i am too lazy to open an ie window :P)

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Alevice's Media Library

Seems to be quite a lot of unnesscessary stuff there:
1. The date/time thing. Really, that doesn't make it seem like you update your site often, only proper content does that.
2. The movie splash page. The design doesn't even fit with the rest of the site.
3. The "best viewed at" part. Everyone using a desktop/laptop computer uses 800x600 or greater now, so do you expect people will resize down to look at your site. It doesn't look awful at my high res. anyway.
Other than that I'd consider it rude to criticise content on a personal site, if that's what it is. So some design issues:
1. Set the background colour of the page to something closer to your background image. At the moment it's black and looks ugly when it's loading.
2. The yellow bold font you use in the navigation just doesn't work at all, it doesn't fit in the slightest with the feel of the navbar. I quite like that navbar graphc.
3. The same can be said for the icons that appear in the little circle, don't seem to fit, and some are copyrighted images which you shouldn't be stealing.
4. Having to mouse over empty buttons that give no visual clue whatsoever as to what they are is annoying and seems pointless.
5. Having to go back to the first page to navigate to other sections (e.g. from tutorials to photos) is annoying as well. You need the navigation to span every page.
6. I could have a big CSS/semantic rant, but that would take a loooong time, and a lot of your time if you wanted to do something about it. It woudl be too cruel.
I hope you don't think this is too cruel a review, but I'd rather spend what time I have pointing out the negatives so you can improve hopefully, because the site does have it's pluses.

Sir Glenn: Here is my review, as promised.

There are time when I'm not certain really where to start, so at times like those I generally start at the beginning. Rather than try to organize my review into a coherent set of comments, I'm going to do this "stream of consciousness" style, which means I'm just going to type what comes to mind as I go through your site. It may be harder to read than an organized review, but it will give you a very clear picture of my experience as a user, and that can be very valuable. So, here goes:

Hmm... a splash page. If you've hung around the Asylum for any length of time, you'll know that many people here take a dim view of splash pages, and I am no exception. It doesn't add anything to the site, it makes users click one extra time to get to the meat of the site, and (in your case) the user is required to have Shockwave to see something they never really needed to see in the first place. I would ditch the splash page without a second thought.

Oh my, what happened to the text? It's definitely not where it's suppose to be--it starts at the same place the graphic starts, which means that it runs right over the top vertical bar of the "interface." Definitely not pretty. Let's view the tables and see if we can't figure out what went wrong here... OK, it looks like the interface is put together by a table, but then the text is sitting outside of the table structure. We're going to need to look at the source for this...

Ah, I think I see the problem--you've got the interface in a table and then the text in a div positioned on top of that with CSS, but you're using absolute positioning. The problem, I think, is that the ad inserted by Angelfire is pushing your interface down, but the text is staying in the same place. At least that's what I think is happening.

Forget about trying to fix it, though. If I were you I would start over with the layout--use CSS to position everything, and then you won't have to worry about things getting pushed down. I would also use an external style sheet rather than having your styles inline.

OK, on to the rest of the site... except there are no buttons on the interface. Well, there are buttons, but they're blank. Ah, I see. This is what is called, in some circles, "Mystery Meat Navigation"--in other words, you don't know what you're getting beforehand. Whatever you want to call it, I think it's generally a bad practice. Why not just have the labels on the buttons in the first place? You could still have the depressed rollovers.

Strangely enough, the image preloading doesn't seem to work. I don't know why, but the contact button in particular hesitates for about a second or so every time I mouse over. Weird.

Another thing that strikes me as weird is the order of the navigational elements--I don't think I've ever seen contact come first. In fact, I think very often it's the last element.

OK, let's check out the tutorials. Whoa, where did the interface go? You obviously worked hard to get a feel going, and now you leave me with a blank page? I also don't understand the vertical arrangement of the tutorials--why make the user scroll when they don't have to?

Also, you do realize that none of your "Photoshop" Tips are actually PS tips, right? The first demonstrates a single KPT filter (which doesn't come with PS), the second demonstrates a JavaScript rollover (JavaScript is not HTML, by the way), the third shows how to download fonts(?), the fourth shows another JS trick, and the fifth is a cheat page for a console game.

On to Pics... well, again, the interface disappears. I also find it interesting that it says "Sir Glenns Photo Page" at the top, yet you have pictures that are obviously not yours. You may have them on your hard drive, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're yours... I would stick with personal pictures, which are more fun to look at anyway.

Ah, a complete change of direction with the guestbook... but that's common with guestbooks hosted elsewhere. You might want to see if you can at least change the colors of the guestbook to match your site.

Not much to say on the links page, except that I wouldn't center everything... it looks a bit sloppy.

I just noticed the date on top of the page... I don't think you need it. It's not a "last modified" date (which is never a good idea anyway), and people don't need your website to tell them what day it is. In short, if it doesn't serve a purpose, ditch it.

You mentioned in your first post above that you're not sure where to go with the site. I realize that it is a personal page, but that doesn't mean you can't have a purpose and goals. What do you want to do with this site? Do you want it to be an expression of yourself? If so, think of the best way to do that, and then build the site around that idea. I'm not saying that a bunch of random stuff can't work, but if you don't have a clear idea of what you want to do when you start out, a bunch of random stuff will end up looking like just that--a bunch of random stuff, and not some ground-breaking design.

Right now, your site lacks coherence--there's just nothing holding it together. You have an interesting interface on the front page, but you abandon that on the second level. And the second level pages themselves look like they were put together without a clear organizational idea in mind. I don't mean that everything has to be planned down to the last letter, but you do need to have some sort of design idea in mind. This will most likely evolve as you work on the site, and that's OK. But nothing will evolve if you don't have an idea to start with.

I went through a similar soul-searching process when I made my site. I thought about what it was that I really wanted to express, and I realized that it was my writing most of all that needed an outlet. Thus, out of the three main sections of my site (there are seven navigational items, but the last four are "supplemental"), two of them deal with my writing. The third section displays my pictures, which is another area where I wanted to express myself. Once I had this basic idea in mind, it was easier to design the site. Because my site would be primarily text, I wanted to keep it simple, and I wanted there to be a large, open space for all that text. After some experimentation (and a lot of help from the good folks here at the Asylum), I ended up with what you see there now.

I hope my comments have been helpful, and I hope they have not been too harsh. If you'd like me to elaborate on anything I said here, or if you have a question, please let me know. I'll be glad to offer what help I can.


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Suho: www.liminality.org

Yah, everyone seems to have summed up most of what I would have said, although I'd like to elaborate on Suho's planning comments.

The whole planning issue doesn?t get breached very often in this forum and I think it?s one of the most important issues that many people overlook or take for granted so I?d like to elaborate on this point for a bit?

Planning is *the* most important part of any website, personal or otherwise. Personal websites can be a little more hap hazard but you still need a plan. After all a website is a document (in most cases), and if you've ever written a paper for school without planning it out first your likely to get crappy grades as it contains no order or structure.

I *always* start my designs on paper (unless it's a group effort -- then white boards are infinitely handy, especially those funky ones that can print out what you all sketch up). Using paper seems a bit wasteful with such a versatile tool like a computer, but a pencil and an eraser is a very fast tool for outlining your a website structure. The outline is the most important, usually in the form of a flowchart that can double as a model for the site navigation. Then I usually move onto the visual design sketches and the last part of the job is finished off on the computer. Although there is usually some amount of go-between from the computer and my sketch books as I experiment with different ideas, but that happen more with highly interactive works.

You don?t have to get too detailed with the design sketches, but pencil and paper it a really quick tool to block out lots of ideas in a short amount of time. I usually just stick to really quick and thumbnail sketches. Most of my design diaries are full of these ? on average I chew through a 120 A4 diary in 2 to 3 months with several sketches / doodles on each page.

In any event - for any size website, actually for anything you make with a computer, sketch and plan it out first. It may seem a little pointless at first but having a clear site map in your hand whilst you fiddle away in Photoshop or your HTML editor really helps. It's also an effective way to identify any possible design or information architecture flaws in your ideas before you've killed too many precious time sheet hours working yourself into an unforseen dead end.

Edit: Coffee fuled fingers care not for spelling.

[This message has been edited by Cameron (edited 11-16-2003).]

^^ I'll second that. I too sketch everything out on paper.

Cameron: Thanks for that clarification. I was getting to the end of a long post there, and trying to wind things down, and I didn't say everything that could have been said. It was a very important point I was trying to make, and I'm glad you singled it out and elaborated on it.


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Suho: www.liminality.org

Suho, and the rest who posted! Thanks for all of your comments, Harsh or not, This is why I posted! The information you posted was really invaluble and well thought out! Guys once again thank you for your help! You Guys Rock!!!!

Thanks

Sir Glenn

Don't Sweat The Small Stuff!