[Bobboau]

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.

[iamzack]

i dont like it

[T-LoW]

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

[Flipside]

i dont like it

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

[iamzack]

i dont like it

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

i was kidding

u ppl take meh 2 srs

[Flipside]

Then at least give a thread a chance to develop a bit before you start throwing spanners

[Bobboau]

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.

[IceFire]

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?

[Bobboau]

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.

[Bobboau]

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:

[Ghostavo]

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.

[castor]

The "latest news and events" thingy looks ugly on 1280x1024 screen, as it gets cut right below the latest item.

[Mika]

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 think reducing the contrast of the background image in the newer site could improve things, also I note that there is something weird with the background image too. Is it a composite of two pictures? The clouds tend to distract the viewer here when viewing the upper part of the page.
• Placing the buttons according to the Golden rule might improve the navigation, I think the buttons are bit too spread to be seen all at once in the sharp FOV. The upper menu bar is strictly outside and at least my eyes take some time to find it, i.e. it is not immediately obvious.
• The pop up text box animation is slowish, and the text is also shadowed by the menus in the page.
• As mentioned earlier, the blue and green are main color components, and in my opinion such strong colors should not be used in the background image, unless the contrast is reduced.

I'm using Opera 11