Website Feedback

[bigmaddaz]

Ok Guys,

Designing a website for a mate of a mate.

Im not a web design whizz like a few on here, slowly learning stuff and trying to master CSS.

Ive done a site for him, content is just made up, hes gotta give me some info to put on it.

Just general feedback about design aspect and visual pointers would be great (be nice) ... im just getting feedback because im gonna do him a few designs and then negotiate a price

Thanks

http://www.aoqo38.dsl.pipex.com/povey/

Daz

 

[Danny Lee]

overall a good job mate

some issues with the main navigation bar, mainly the white behond the buttons goin out of sync and going over the yellow border at the bottom of the nav buttons

also the pics on the gallery arnt aligning straight, prob just tapped the space bar the wrond place or somethin cos the pics dont align from top to bottom

i would recommend you make use of alt tags for yourimages for search engine optimisation and also look into the lightbox javascript for your images, its a really nice script that displays the images over the page in a nice flash-esq block, would suit that site very well

like i say tho, overall very impressive work mate

 

[Dash]

Neat and simple. Good work.

Image page looks a bit odd in Opera.

Screen Shot

 

[leeds_182]

Looks alright to me!

 

[bigmaddaz]

Thanks for feedback so far, gonna jump in shower then to a bit more fiddling!

I used firefox to view it, and iexplore, I noticed the overlap on the white on the nav bar will change that later.

Those pictures in opera are very strange! never ever used opera... any web gurus no how to sort that out for opera?

Keep the feedback coming please

 

[Adams_16v]

looking good mate, looks like a pro job!!

 

[donofkarma]

Looks good - might want to run it through the w3c validators though - picking up a few erros with my FireFox extension.

-Jas.

 

[furry_cup]

slight nudging of the navigation buttons between pages,

the way the index page is at the moment, it will validate if you include the alt attributes to the images.

From what this says anyway

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=h...(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0

looks good overall..

 

[furry_cup]

Also, might suggest removing your email address from the bottom of the pages.

maybe just say webdesign by bigmaddaz then link from there, just me being petty lol!

You can also embed google map into pages now using the API given to you by google, this can be pretty smart.

for the image gallery, you could always use an application called lightbox to open up the images once they are clicked, this looks pretty tidy, a lot of sites are using this these days.

I always include alt attributes to all images and i also give all links a title attribute.

 

[sn00p]

I don't like it, but that's only my opinion!

Also you've used a PNG with transparency which won't work properly in any version of IE below version 7 (there are ways of "beating" this using active-x to render it, but that may pop up security warnings).

 

[furry_cup]

you can use javascript too, but not all people have it turned on, id not use png's unless you really have to.

i see a lot of the images are png's, save them as gif's where you can, or jpegs.

 

[Matt_Clio172]

Needs more work to be honest mate. It is only a small site (3 pages) not so sure why you have gone for quite a big design. I personally would have made the bg black. Created a table in dreamweaver. Centre it.... and design the whole site in the table with a frame for previous work with scroll bar. Rather than have the whole page. If you know what I mean

 

[furry_cup]

CSS is the way forward im afraid

 

[Matt_Clio172]

CSS is the way forward im afraid

Agreed, usually i design it all in photoshop... slice up images and export. Then code the site in dreamweaver. Seeing as this is only a small site there aint really a point in doing that though

 

[donofkarma]

A quick note on the png thing:

It's only the alpha transparency of a png that won't render correctly on IE6 and below - didn't find this out till about a month ago and since have found that using png's in some cases gives a better, smaller file that a gif/jpg - they are brilliant for gradient effects!

Also, if you are developing in firefox there are a fair amount of extensions that will help - have a look on the firefox site for them all.

-Jas.

 

[bigmaddaz]

Lads, this help is really great from all of you, all little pointers which will really help me improve the website and learn more about designing. As I said its only one of my very first ones, jsut trying to master css.

I only picked png files because of transparency and smaller than jpg. So is gif better to use than png?

 

[furry_cup]

http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/png-gif

x

 

[KDF]

The site is pretty basic.

The graphics are very amateur looking (menu buttons etc) the swap images look tacky.

get rid of the **Website design by Darren Plews bigmaddaz@hotmail.com ** as an @hotmail.com address screams amateur.

Stop using dreamweaver...

The javascript resize is annoying as it doesnt resize the window until after the image has loaded, use a script to set the window size when opening the window.. not after.

Get rid of the text that is actually an image under the contact us section.. use an image for the email address if you must (to avoid spiders) but use CSS to set the fonts and make it real text !

Lastly you need to add more content to the site.. but you probably already knew that

 

[sn00p]

I only picked png files because of transparency and smaller than jpg. So is gif better to use than png?

View your page in IE6 and you'll see how bad the images look.

I've used tricks in the CSS/Javascipt so that FF/Safari/IE7+ use pngs but IE6 uses jpgs.

Here's one I did at work. There are some "invalid" div's and stuff, but nothing seems to mind so I can't be arsed to fix it.

I designed it and wrote everything from scratch.

www.componentbin.com

 

[timmmah]

Good site for someone learning but looking through your code, you have this within the HTML:

body {
background-color: #CCCCCC;


}Seeing as you have an external style sheet, why not insert that CSS into there?

 

[furry_cup]

I designed it and wrote everything from scratch.

www.componentbin.com

sn00p,

did you make the navigation too? (product menu)

Looking for something like that for a site i am working on.

 

[sn00p]

sn00p,

did you make the navigation too? (product menu)

Looking for something like that for a site i am working on.

That was one bit I didn't write! lol. Forgot about that. I did modify it though quite a lot!

Download the script from the site, it's public domain.

 

[furry_cup]

ok, thanks mate.

 

[Adams_16v]

shop looks good, did u code the actual e-commerce side of it, thats good going if so! works well!

 

[sn00p]

shop looks good, did u code the actual e-commerce side of it, thats good going if so! works well!

Cheers.

Yeah. Wrote it all as I couldn't find a shopping cart system that worked how I wanted it to, they were either to basic or looked like crap. Figured the best way was just to write my own.

That way I could make the site look and work exactly how I wanted.

I'm not a web designer or graphic artist but I did the design in illustrator and exported it as PNG's and sliced it all up.

Obviously the advantage of writing it myself is that I know exactly how it works and I can add features very easily. I added a discount voucher system that allows really complex discount coupons to be set up and such like.

God bless php!

 

[bigmaddaz]

With regards, designing it all in photoshop and slicing it up, ive done this before but all imports as tables, this is NOT reccomended though ? yea?

 

[furry_cup]

hmm not the 'politically correct' way some might say. i guess its up to you, can can acheive good results, sn00ps is an example!

 

[quikshine]

The site looks good and you should be pleased with yourself. Thinking back the the very first site I made yours looks far far better! I design websites on a freelance basis occasionally, just when it suits me... I did the same as what your doing and basically taught myself after being shown basic HTML stuff at school. Some stuff I do may not be the right way, but I stick at it until it all works and looks the way I want it to. This is a site im currently working on www.venku.co.uk which started off as a basic OScommerce shop like this http://demo.oscommerce.com/ which I have then edited to my liking and I did all the graphics/artwork in photoshop.. and this is an old one I did a few years ago which im going to revamp completely in the next few weeks! www.daisiescafe.co.uk

Just keep being patient and like me you will get enjoyment out of it and seeing the code you write work!

 

[sn00p]

With regards, designing it all in photoshop and slicing it up, ive done this before but all imports as tables, this is NOT reccomended though ? yea?

Mines all css, tables are freaking annoying. You can spend so much time trying to make them work on a complex layout.

I did my design in illustrator for a number of reasons:

1) It's vectors, so it scales. This was important to me so that I could adjust the size until I was happy.

2) I'm crap at anything graphics wise, so I find illustrator much easier to flesh it out.

3) I can export easily to PNG. Once it's a PNG I could load it into photoshop and butcher it ready for css.

CSS can be a little tricky, and I misunderstood the meaning of "id", so the css technically isn't correct on my site, but every browser I've tried it in renders correctly, so I really couldn't be bothered to fix it. It would be pretty simple to fix.

Like I said, I did the whole site myself. It's all php driven and hand written, didn't use any web design package because I think they're all crap as well.

Maybe I'm just hard to please!

 

[sn00p]

sn00p,

did you make the navigation too? (product menu)

Looking for something like that for a site i am working on.

This is where it came from.

http://www.destroydrop.com/javascripts/tree/default.html

I think it has a problem in an old version of IE or something, but I fixed that in my version. I also altered it so that it didn't require the root node so that it works like the product list.

It was also the *only* tree that I tried that played nicely with CSS. I tried loads and loads of commerical ones and they all failed miserably being encased in my css. This one I dropped in and worked and everything resized correctly.

It was geting to the stage where I was going to write my own, but I found that one.

On the backend of the site I wrote a dynamic menu creation widget in javascript which allows you to add, delete, move etc nodes on the product tree.

 

[bigmaddaz]

Ok working on a new design for it now, quite similar but just a few new little things:

http://www.aoqo38.dsl.pipex.com/povey2

****THE SITE WORKS FINE IN FIREFOX AND SLIDESHOW WORKS CORRECT****

*****THE SITE SLIDESHOW DOESNT WORK IN IEXPLORE****

Anyone used this lightbox before?

http://www.javascriptkit.com/script/script2/backbox/

thats the one im using but cant get it working in Iexplore works a treat in firefox though!