Topic: it'll prolly never be finished, but...

...now that I've got it how I like it, I want your opinions.



I focus on the pain; The only thing that's real (Trent Reznor)

looks 'photoshopped'

you might try envisioning in your mind how you want something to look and then attempting to make that image (instead of just messing around in photoshop until you have something)

0.02¢

quote:

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reisio said:

looks 'photoshopped'

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the sig?

no, no, no... the site



You know I'd like to keep my cheeks dry today, so stay with me and I'll have it made (Shannon Hoon)

I X I: Next time, just give us a plain link the first time around. I had no idea what you were talking about either, especially since this is in the site reviews forum and all I could see was a sig.

I think it's time for yet another edition of "Stream of Conciousness Reviews"...

Very small content area... that's never a good sign.

This website is really only here for one reason: For me to be able to say "Check out my website!"

Wow. OK, this is going to sound harsh, but if that's why you created this, then you need to pack up your HTML and hit the road. Websites are (or should be) created for a purpose, and mere existence in and of itself is not a purpose.

That animated gif at the top? The one that keeps going back and forth? Yeah, that's really starting to get on my nerves. It also happens to be totally unnecessary--right underneath the image, you have a table cell with "IXI" in it. Why the extra title? (Fortunately, I have the Aardvark plug-in for FF, so I can remove the image and stop the torture. God, I love this plug-in. Thank you Lacuna!)

OK, now that the animated gif is gone I can focus on the rest of the page, which now occupies about, oh maybe 40% of the browser window area.

Gray on black doesn't really do it for me, especially with all those colorful buttons on the right that keep drawing my eyes away.

One word: padding. As in, please give me some space around words/within borders so my eyes don't implode. I hate when that happens. With those dashed borders, the menu items border on "painful to read." Leading (a.k.a. line spacing) can also be a good thing when used judiciously.

Why is there a link to the home page on the home page? Recursive links make baby Jesus cry. They also make me have to aardvark that animated gif again.

Clicking on "board" now... oh, I get it. The home page is so short because there's no content there yet. (Aardvarking animated gif yet again... this is getting stale pretty fast. I'm considering just blocking images from your site.)

OK, the board... I can see pages getting really long really quick. Your content area itself is narrow, then you've got more horizontal space taken up by the left menu and the colorful buttons on the right. On top of that, each post takes up at least nine vertical lines, even if the post is only one line long. I can see this board being very unfun to navigate in the near future.

Also, I haven't looked at the source yet (I usually do that last), but I can see you're using fixed width. This is not good. (More on this later.)

Images... sigs... aim... etc. OK, not much to say here. Pretty much more of the same.

General thoughts on the look: completely uninspiring. Kind of makes me want to shave the hair off the top of my toes with a rusty razor. You know, just to spice things up a bit. Why gray on black? I still don't understand that. Black can be sleek, black can be classy, black can be cool. But you have to know how to use it. The little black dress of the fashion world is timeless. This current design is not. And, now that I'm thinking about it, what's with the riveted plate metal background? How does that fit into the metaphor? Or am I assuming too much?

I'm looking at the "about me" page, and I see "this site's here for me to be able to say that it's here" once again. But reading the text that follows it, I think I get it now. Your site is, in other words, a place for you to experiment and learn new things, and it may end up being a portfolio in the future. OK, that's fine. If that's what it is, say it. But don't say that the site is there just so you can say it's there. That gives people the impression that you couldn't give a flying squirrel about it and just want to have a URL to put on your business card. Especially if you hope to someday use this as a portfolio, remove that text from the front page and replace it with something meaningful.

Another thing, if you hope to use this site as an online portfolio, my advice would be this: less clutter. Lose the background image and break the boxy setup you've got going on. A lot of things are currently getting in the way of the visitor actually paying any attention to your content (things that I have mentioned above, like the colorful buttons on the right (which are on the links page anyway, now that I think about it, so why do they have to be on every page?), that unholy spawn of Satan you've got jigging back and forth at the top of the page, the wholly uninspiring typography and color scheme, etc.). The last thing you want to do is get between your visitor and the content you want him or her to see. Design should assist the visitor, not hinder the visitor.

On to the code. You've accomplished something impressive here: you've gotten away from table-based design, yet still managed to make the page look like a nest of tables.

Not sure about the use of break tags. All I have to do is increase the text size a bit and the lines start spilling over. This is all wrong, the whole approach I mean. You set the width of an element and then you let the text wrap. You should never use break tags to force line breaks (unless you're writing poetry or something, and even then you might be better served by marking up the text as preformatted). This is why we have paragraph tags, because paragraphs are unchanging semantic elements. Lines (outside of poetry and code) are not unchanging; they change depending on their environment.

But this all really goes back to the whole fixed width thing. People view websites at a variety of different sizes (browser window sizes, that is). Attempting to design for the "lowest common denominator" is a bad approach. You should design so that all visitors get an optimal experience. This is sometimes difficult to perfectly realize, but most of the time you can pull it off.

Summary: There's a lot wrong with this site, and I've only touched on some of the issues here (mostly the issues near and dear to my heart). I realize that it was probably pretty painful to read this long-winded and sometimes harsh review but, well, you did ask. Some of what I wrote is personal opinion, some of it is conventional, and some of it is possibly useless. Hopefully some of it will be of assistance, and hopefully you'll keep working on it and keep learning new things.

[Edit: dear God that's a long review. Sorry about that.

Just wanted to comment on this line from your sig: "You know I'd like to keep my cheeks dry today, so stay with me and I'll have it made (Shannon Hoon)"

Is that what that lyric says? I had no idea. I always thought it was, "You know I'd like to keep my cheating strategy." Still have no idea what it means...]

___________________________
Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup | "Hooray for linguistic idiots and yak milk!"

(Edited by Suho1004 on 04-26-2005 11:07)

quote:

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Suho1004 said:

dear God that's a long review

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yes. yes it is. but worth reading, thank you.

I just got a decent computer system (duron 900) this weekend and I finally feel like working on my website again. which is really why I asked for this review, so I can work on what needs to be worked on.

if you didn't know, my monitor had been on it's last leg for quite some time and I was running win98se on a pII, but that's a whole other story...

and as far as No Rain is concerned, just listen a little harder next time, it's clearer when you listen harder.

[edit]
www.ixifx.net/ixifx.net/
and, yes, I know, the banner is HUGE. it's just something that's still for the moment.
[/edit]



Life is too short, so love the one you got (Bradley Nowell)

(Edited by I X I on 04-26-2005 12:54)

(Edited by I X I on 04-26-2005 12:56)

Wow, big visual improvement in such a short time.

Don't have much time to comment at the moment (gotta get packing for a trip), but keep up the good work.

___________________________
Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup

well, I've been working on it a little more tonight, I've been simplifying (sp?) the php generated tables for the most part, but I have done some to the layout, too.

Old
New (and possibly constantly changing)

anybody else have any comments, likes/dislikes (other than the lack of content )?

also, any suggestions on the font?

[edit] I just noticed that the navigation doesn't come out quite right in IE... [/edit]



Life is too short, so love the one you got (Bradley Nowell)

(Edited by I X I on 04-28-2005 14:11)

The second "new" site...the blue font color is hard to read on my computer...Maybe find a real ICY blue between pure white and the blue shades in the images.
White white is never a good color..just as black is better if it is a shade off...dark dark blue is a better color than Pure Black, in other words.
A very dark blue text on an ivory or off white background
Or a very ICE almost white shade of blue on a blue background works well..cuts the glare and is readable.
Lighten UP
The Font
Otherwise fine enough

The blue isn't so bad to read on my CRT, but it is a tad difficult to read on my LCD... I agree that a lighter shade might work better.

___________________________
Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup

on colors: I'll put a few dif. colors up here and you guys can give me some feedback

suho, whould you mind if I used a variant of your color swatcher (considering I could figure it out enough to modify it)?



Do you serve a purpose or purposely serve (Corey Taylor)

well, I've got a little something to show off
have a look here and feel free to comment



Life is too short, so love the one you got (Bradley Nowell)

I've got no problems with you using a variant of my color switcher, especially since I received help from a number of sources in putting it together (Dracusis/Cameron and Slime), and much of the code comes from those other sources. It is a combination of JS and PHP, though, so if you want to take a look at the PHP end send me an email and I'll send you some code.

As for the new colors, the blue is better, but the green gives me the heebie-jeebies. I've never really been a fan of green on black, though.

___________________________
Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup

quote:

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Suho1004 said:

heebie-jeebies

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^ lol

well, I'm trying to get it done on my own, but I'm having trouble (it's my first time playing with cookies)



Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most (Ozzy Osbourne)

well, the color switcher is working for me, how does it work for you?
http://www.ixifx.net/ixifx.net/

and because I'm so proud of the code, here are snippets for all to see

in each page

<head>

		<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" rel="nofollow" href="<? echo $_COOKIE["userstyle"] . ".css" ?>">

	</head>

	<body>

		<img src="<? echo "img/" . $_COOKIE["userstyle"] . ".gif" ?>" alt="IXI">

		Styles:<br>

		<a rel="nofollow" href=style.php?newstyle=blue><img src="img/b.gif"></a>

		<a rel="nofollow" href=style.php?newstyle=green><img src="img/g.gif"></a>

	</body>

style.php

<?

	setcookie("userstyle", $newstyle, time()+60*60*24*30);

	header("Location: $_SERVER[HTTP_REFERER]");

?>

You could stand me up at the gates of hell, but I won't back down (Tom Petty)

First off, the link there is 404... so I went to www.ixifx.net instead...

And you forgot to set a default style.

What that means, of course, is that I'm looking at a completely unstyled page. You didn't see this during development because the cookie was already set.

Other than that, the style switcher looks to be working fine in FF. I've got a question for you, though: have you looked at the site in IE? I use FF myself, so I didn't have any problems, but I just looked at it in IE 6 and it is majorly snafued--the menu items are positioned too far to the left in the menu box. Take a look and you'll see what I mean.

I can appreciate the "Get Firefox" sentiment, but the majority of people out there still use IE. If you leave this site as is you're pretty much just shooting yourself in the foot.

___________________________
Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup

I hadn't checked it in IE for a while, and I've been working on simplifying my CSS and code. I had the navigation nested in an unordered list, but that always gave me this wierd offset, so I just went to using regular links and it's working pretty well, but I'm having issues with it in firefox (see www.ixifx.net).



You could stand me up at the gates of hell, but I won't back down (Tom Petty)