Topic: Small Glass Site

I have been lurking here for years, but this is my first post. I am putting together a small site for a friend's Glass Shop. It is small and simple, so try to tear it up: Lakeside Beta.

The gallery page is just mocked up, so those errors don't count!

from one old dad to another: welcome

COLORS:
If that were anything other than a blown glass site, or perhaps a psychedlic 60's velvet black light poster site, I'd say yikes! on the colors. But I think it fits, though I'd still not be happy to be stuck reading yellow on black all day. Thankfull, the verbiage is light.

MARKUP:
I'm a little confused by your doctype, html 4, your markup is near perfectly valid xhtml1 (you have a few closing slashes missing, some included, mixed bag). You've done well in most places making the markup semantically meaningful, tho the horizontal navigation could/should be a list if you're going to use UL for the other link lists in the site.

CSS:
Pretty simple layout so not much to talk about (I like that aspect ). You could stand to use some shortcuts, for examples:

margin: 5px 5px 5px 5px;

becomes

margin: 5px;



margin: 5px 15px 5px 15px;

becomes

margin: 5px 15px;



font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;

font-size: 12px;

font-style: italic;

becomes

font : italic 12px verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;

Some of your structural div element IDs leave me scratching my head a little, those could be made more meaningful.

TEXT:
The bold red serifed typeface you've chosen for some headlines is not readable in spots. goudy, caslon are also problably not a real good choice for prevelance, but you have covered your butt with decent backups behind them. Could use some attention to line-height and top/bottom padding on your paragraphs for the sake of readability.

Overall you could stand to finesses the "white space" a little here and there but the aforementioned paragraph tweaks should go a long way toward that end.

All and all a great first post, hope to see you around.

Thanks,
I was wondering if anyone would reply!

As for the colors, the black was not my choice... The others were trying to work with the logo and the glasswork. I am not crazy about the colors, but I worked at getting something that sortof worked. I am still not happy with the overall feel, but I have exhausted my limited color sense.

As for the markup, I am working toward xhtml, but haven't finished my homework. I guess this is a good opportunity.

I wanted the CSS to be really simple, but it got a little more complex than I had envisioned. Many of the IDs were added in the middle of the night and I haven't cleaned it up yet. I am relatively new at CSS and I need to learn a bit more before the shorcuts come naturally.

As for the text, I put the Goudy to match the logo, but it really doesn't work. Thankfully that fix only takes a couple of lines these days!

Thanks for your critique. I have been wandering around the Asylum for years, but was always intimidated by the incredible talent around here. However, I know that this is the best place on the net to get real feedback, and I appreciate your help and welcome.

quote:

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Many of the IDs were added in the middle of the night and I haven't cleaned it up yet

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sounds vaguely familiar I always *intend* to back and clean up after I'm done but it rarely happens bit of a slob here