Constructive Critic Please

Squiffythewombat · Post by **Squiffythewombat** » Sat Dec 01, 2007 12:48 pm

Hi Guys,

Just about to hand in my first uni project, a simple 5 page website. I could really do with hearing ANY bad points you guys can see with this site. Please dont concern yourself with the content (its just random) but i would really like to know if it....

a)is pleasing to the eye, if you dont like it why not?
b)displays correctly in your browser, are there any errors?
c)takes ages to load on your computer?
d)etc... any other comments...

please be as honest as possible as otherwise i cannot improve! Thankyou, your comments will be used in my presentation (hopefully)

http://www.semodels.com/wd3/index.html

Toby

Kermit · Post by **Kermit** » Sat Dec 01, 2007 1:06 pm

My desktop is set to 1280 x 960 & I viewed it using Firefox.

The site is functioning fine & I like the general design cues.
However, I don't like the way the centre of the page with the content is black but the sides of the page are white. I can see your trying to get the menu's & designs to kinda spill over onto the page but the contrast between black & white is a little disconserting.

Oh & why isn't the firestorm listed amongst your fave bikes huh ? HUH ?

Stratman · Post by **Stratman** » Sat Dec 01, 2007 1:54 pm

I haven't used CSS for positioning yet like yours is, I just use it for styles at the moment. I can see it is more flexible. One of my sites has a layer overlapping what appears to be the edge of the page to creat a similar effect, but CSS would probably be better.

White text is always tiring on the eyes I find

In IE7 at 1280 x 1024 it is fine, ditto 1024 x 768, but doesn't resize so at 800 x 600 need horizontal scrollbar (though not many people use that resolution any more I know)

Cheers for now

Wicky · Post by **Wicky** » Sat Dec 01, 2007 10:47 pm

The large images used throughout your content are not resized so they noticeably take time to load on Safari despite 4mb broadband - would be a pain for dial up. Is it more important for the viewer to see large images or to have a lag free experience?

The Font for the CSS & WEBDESIGN (WEB DESIGN ?) looks Monty Pythonesque, reinforced by the mish mash of 2D vector clip art scroll work and 3d perspective and figures (http://www.negrospaceprogram.com/blog/nsp-movie/ ?) . I expect a big DHTML foot to come down and squash the butterflies

university of Kent (capital U)

Claude Monet

"Born in france" (capital F) impressionism (capital I)

Sickboy

lithographing (lithography ?)

Giger (H.R. GIGER)

"George Lucas on the film Alien" Surely Ridley Scott

"undertaken" used twice - cut the one at the end of the sentence

Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind

.." within the lead roles subconscious." role's ?

War of the Worlds

"...wish to colinse the earth.." colonise

28 Days Later

" becomes a quantee zone"

I give up at this point as there is a basic English mistake that annoyingly grates in almost every section. Pay attention as the project's marker will notice! esp. The basic mistake with George Lucas and Alien will not impress your design teachers, and being a designer doesn't mean that you lose the ability to spell - future clients will also expect to see good English :-)

Could you use the colour displayed by the butterflies for the A href text-decoration. Use blue for your links to compliment your designand then use the orange for the mouse over and possibly also use CSS to subtly colour the page headings as well.

Is it made on a mac, what editor are you using or are you hand coding?

Good luck, work hard and is the Curry House in town centre Canterbury with the downstairs area still open?

John

PS Where's a bleedin Storm in your bikes section!

Post by **firestorm_al** » Sun Dec 02, 2007 12:37 am

The first thing I'd say is that I don't exactly have a slow computer but when I try using the scroll wheel on my mouse to go up and down the page it is very jerky (Windows XP, Firefox, 1Gb ram etc ..)

Al.

Squiffythewombat · Post by **Squiffythewombat** » Sun Dec 02, 2007 3:38 pm

Hi Guys,

Thanks for your replies. Firstly, PLEASE IGNORE THE CONTENT. nothing has been spell checked etc. as i'll do that last, its easier! The storms not there because it isnt really my favourite bike to be honest:O its just one i can afford

Kermit - would you say the contrast makes the page too hard to read? would you also agree on the white text contributing to this?

Strat - we were told not to pay much attention to 800*600 res for this project. I believe resizing and stuff comes later when designing for mobile apps etc.

Timbo- Is this just in IE, ive not got any artifacts showing on my computer or the uni's?

Wicky- Some great points thankyou! When you say the large images do you means the pictures as ive not resized them yet or are you talking about the header/footer etc?

Guessing you dont like the vector/picture style, i think i spend too much time on deviant lol! Im still unsure of the "css & webdesign" font too, i'll have to try and find a more fitting one.

As i mentioned above, nothing has been spell checked yet etc, still to sort the content (am dyslexic so it comes last). should of just dumped in latin for demoing.

Great idea for the links, i will give that a go, still unsure if i should just make some actual buttons, or maybe use a different font.

The site was made in dreamweaver (by hand because the "design" mode hates CSS) and PS CS3 on a very old athlon based pc.

Dont think so, cant think of any curry houses with downstairs here and ive been here my whole life. Are you from canterbury then i assume? its changed loads over the past few years!

Al - thats very odd, im assuming it was just my page that did this? did it do this on the homepage as well as other pages?

Thanks LOADS for all your input guys!!!!!

Kermit · Post by **Kermit** » Mon Dec 03, 2007 12:25 am

I wouldn't say it's particularly difficult to read, its just the middle black area against the bright white sides & text is a little hard on the eyes.