Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Bobboau on November 10, 2010, 11:26:21 pm
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working on a website, looking for suggestions
ok, so company I work for is planning on changing it's website (www.delistarinc.com (http://www.delistarinc.com)), and sense the last company we outsourced this sort of thing to charged us $12,000 and has been really dickish and ****ed up our email for half a week for no good reason at all, I have been tasked with trying to do it entirely by myself. unfortunately aesthetics are not my strong point so I have typically shied away from public website design, so I have placed a copy of what i have done so far on a publicly accessible folder on our internal webserver, which if things go well may soon also be our public web server. the background image is temporary, but a background image is part of the design, this represents 6 hours of work, so it's very much a first draft, but I need some people to pick at it to help me figure out where I want to go from here.
this is only the home page, none of the links work, there is a bit of animated jiberish content that is a standing for PR BS that pops up when you mouseover the three catch lines on the right, that's all I've got so far. I'm planning on this being purely HTML, with an eye toward future proofing more so that backwards compatibility, though if I can avoid it I'd like it to work on at least IE7.
Delistar (http://delistar.getmyip.com/ext/new_delistar_website/)
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needs moar tits
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any helpful feedback?
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I'll bite:
on the homepage: looks pretty good, but I don't like the mouse-over to make text appear bits on the right side I'd rather see on the left.
the "latest news and events" box feels too small, and the bit where it scales to my browser window height isn't something I particularly like, but for width its cool.
I'd rather I be able to scroll down and then see the news and articles, rather than scrolling through the object.
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but I don't like the mouse-over to make text appear bits on the right side I'd rather see on the left.
I second this. The mouse-over text should also become a hand (or something to indicate that they will doing something). Also, I think they should be links to the same information that they pop up so that someone that has javascript disabled will still be able to see that they are missing something (with the hand) and still be able to see what they are missing by following the link (even if said linked page is just all three items on a page together).
Another thought about the hover links, the text feels too close to the edge of the background, it feels like it is peaking just over the figurative cliff.
I also agree that the news should just flow down the page and not be a small text box that itself contains the news.
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News box bigger and/or more noticeable.
I feel some nice buttons for the top menu links would look nice. That's just me though.
Maybe make the information that pops up after a mouseover of the little tabs to the right flow from said tabs. Add emphasis when hovering over as well.
Disclaimer: IANAWD
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I have incorporated some suggestions, most notably I got rid of the scrolling news box.
as far as the mouse-overs on the right, this was effectively a requirement marketing gave me, he really likes em on the right, so while I may or may not agree with putting them on the left rather than right, this is one of those client-preference-overrides-good-choices situations.
I also made a few other changes, most obvious being a cycling background.
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It's probably just me or my computer, but the white text in the news articles and the 'make a sandwich' section seems to blend a tad too much with the whitishness of the background.
EDIT: Oh and you misspelled sandwich. :nervous:
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... no I didn't :nervous:
do you not have a reddish background behind the text? what browser are you using?
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I can see the reddish background - that definitely adds some contrast to allow it to be read more easily. I think 'blend' isn't quite the right word... Actually, I think it's OK. I'm using Firefox 3.6.12 and an LCD screen. I'll try a different monitor, but as said, since the text is readable it likely doesn't really matter.
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I could make it darker trivially if you think that's all there is to it.
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I can see the reddish background - that definitely adds some contrast to allow it to be read more easily. I think 'blend' isn't quite the right word... Actually, I think it's OK. I'm using Firefox 3.6.12 and an LCD screen. I'll try a different monitor, but as said, since the text is readable it likely doesn't really matter.
I thought you were being funny about FF 3.6.12, but then I checked, and lo and behold, it's 3.6.12.
Anyways, I'm not sure if it's the same for anyone else out there, but scrolling on your webpage is agonizing lag hell. That aside, it looks really good/professional, though I don't like your font choice for the buttons up top, and some of the fonts seem Fischer-Price big.
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As you appear to have properly formatted HTML, used relative stylesheets, and generally did everything right from the formatting side of things, I have no real comment.
I suppose the text links at the top look rather bland. You could use some fun CSS and spice them up (image replacements are fun).
I do notice some significant rendering lag in Firefox when scrolling on this crappy business laptop of mine; might want to see if you can lower the overhead from the images.
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I resampled the big logo down a bit and got rid of the scaling formatting, perhapse this will fix the lagtitude people are experiencing.
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Oh, with the pop-up messages, increase the opacity a little. It makes the text easier to read.
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Another thought about the hover links, the text feels too close to the edge of the background, it feels like it is peaking just over the figurative cliff.
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added some padding to hoverthingys.
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While old, this (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designmistakes.html) is a good read.
Also, the website seems to be slow. For example, scrolling seems to take a few fractions of second too much and the animations too. I assume it's because of my resolution (1920x1200).
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It's almost certainly my resolution, but a lot of the text blocks are overlapping each other. I'm set to 1280x720. Such as the "Welcome to Delistar!" box is kinda... inside the "News" box.