Hard Light Productions Forums

Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Bobboau on January 18, 2011, 04:04:30 pm

Title: website design round 2
Post by: Bobboau on January 18, 2011, 04:04:30 pm
y'all may remember that I have been working on a new website for my company, well, a lot of progress has been made and a number of significant changes have been implement scene the last time I talked about it, it's starting to develop some momentum and might actually get done. it can currently be seen at http://new.delistarinc.com (http://www.delistarinc.com is the current actual web site for comparison). the majority of the meat of the site is now looking how I think it's going to end up looking. it works best in Firefox and Chrome, but I have started implementing Internet Explorer compatibility, the biggest difference right now is that the slide show effect in the background does not work in IE.

anywho, seeing as I am chugging right along I figured I'd open it up to criticism once again before things got too nailed down.
Title: Re: website design round 2
Post by: iamzack on January 18, 2011, 04:17:40 pm
i dont like it
Title: Re: website design round 2
Post by: T-LoW on January 18, 2011, 04:35:48 pm
Very constructive, little miss.

@ Topic

Are the central pictures lvl-shot? They seem to be pretty blurry and stretched on my 24" monitor. Also I think the background picture is way too saturated (almost hurts the eyes).
I like your overall concept.
But maybe you can do something with the Excel-like tables (product, description, image, etc). They look a little bit to sterile.
The overall white/grey ramp looks cool and like a clean kitchen - good psychology here.

For the tables maybe try something like those three boxes at the bottom of the McD website:

http://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en/food/full_menu/sandwiches/angus_bacon_cheese.html
Title: Re: website design round 2
Post by: Flipside on January 18, 2011, 04:45:18 pm
i dont like it

Either be constructive in your criticism, or don't give it.
Title: Re: website design round 2
Post by: iamzack on January 18, 2011, 05:04:52 pm
i dont like it

Either be constructive in your criticism, or don't give it.

i was kidding

u ppl take meh 2 srs
Title: Re: website design round 2
Post by: Flipside on January 18, 2011, 05:07:28 pm
Then at least give a thread a chance to develop a bit before you start throwing spanners :p
Title: Re: website design round 2
Post by: Bobboau on January 18, 2011, 07:37:34 pm
Are the central pictures lvl-shot? They seem to be pretty blurry and stretched on my 24" monitor.

they should be, though it looks like some resolutions might be triggering some javascript that maximizes the viewable area which is intended for low resolution environments. also the source images for those is 1200x900, so if you are above that it might be the cause of the blurriness.

Also I think the background picture is way too saturated (almost hurts the eyes).
I like your overall concept.
But maybe you can do something with the Excel-like tables (product, description, image, etc). They look a little bit to sterile.
The overall white/grey ramp looks cool and like a clean kitchen - good psychology here.

For the tables maybe try something like those three boxes at the bottom of the McD website:

http://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en/food/full_menu/sandwiches/angus_bacon_cheese.html

I shall try this tomorrow.
Title: Re: website design round 2
Post by: IceFire on January 18, 2011, 08:30:46 pm
You'll probably hate me for this but right now I think the old site has the better design. I'm looking past the work in progress and looking at the design only. The older/current one is simpler and easier to find what you're looking for although I can see it could use some refinement as well. I think it may be the lack of "white space" on the new one. Try and widen up the margins and padding in places where it makes sense and reduce the amount of business brought about by the background picture, foreground picture, etc.

Also it has quite a few rendering issues and my browser experience is very different for some reason than yours. Chrome has rendering bugs (I'm using the latest 8.0 release (not running nightlies or betas), Internet Explorer 8 is alright but with a few bugs, and Firefox 4 beta 8 seems to be the best of the bunch. What versions are you running?
Title: Re: website design round 2
Post by: Bobboau on January 19, 2011, 03:05:12 am
ff3.6

as I mentioned, there seems to be a bug that is causing the side margins to be cut when they are not supposed to be (I collapse them when rendered on narrow monitors) this is probably an issue.
Title: Re: website design round 2
Post by: Bobboau on January 19, 2011, 09:59:17 am
ok, I tweaked that code to make it less sensitive, see if that makes it look better, for reference right now it is supposed to look like this:
(http://www.hexellent.com/files/80/Screenshot-1.png)
Title: Re: website design round 2
Post by: Ghostavo on January 19, 2011, 11:55:45 am
You'll probably hate me for this but right now I think the old site has the better design. I'm looking past the work in progress and looking at the design only. The older/current one is simpler and easier to find what you're looking for although I can see it could use some refinement as well. I think it may be the lack of "white space" on the new one. Try and widen up the margins and padding in places where it makes sense and reduce the amount of business brought about by the background picture, foreground picture, etc.

Basically what he said.

The older looks better since it has more of a minimalistic approach to it. Its colour scheme and style also merges well with the company's logo.

The newer one looks forced with the blues and greens to the sides, and using a image as a background for text doesn't work well, unless the image is more or less uniform.

Another potential improvement would be to use less fonts. Try to get the logo's font and use it or other similar fonts for the rest of the website.
Title: Re: website design round 2
Post by: castor on January 19, 2011, 02:22:33 pm
The "latest news and events" thingy looks ugly on 1280x1024 screen, as it gets cut right below the latest item.
Title: Re: website design round 2
Post by: Mika on January 19, 2011, 02:25:33 pm
Quote
Basically what he said.

The older looks better since it has more of a minimalistic approach to it. Its colour scheme and style also merges well with the company's logo.

The newer one looks forced with the blues and greens to the sides, and using a image as a background for text doesn't work well, unless the image is more or less uniform.

I agree with this.

Some comments:

I'm using Opera 11