I'm getting pretty far along on this site and I'm thinking about changing some things and I wanna do it now before I get too much further. The site is http://www.everythingnow.net/themovietimeline/ Right now, I have amazon product previews for all of the movies on the timeline. I kind of find those pop-ups a little annoying when I'm surfing the site. Should I go with a regular "buy button" instead of the preview pop-up? What do you guys think? Any layout suggestions? Color changes? Any feedback would be helpful.
ehhh.. its okay. maybe get some new colors. and change the black headers to maybe some nice round images. also maybe a new logo? other than that layout is nice
Nice. Specifically I would personally take that second block of content in the right column (containing the three ad placements and the table of contents, and move it to the bottom of the page. Of course, that's pure esthetics, more practically the problem is your table of contents literally borders on another copy of the table of contents. In this case swap your ad placements with the table of contents inside the block in the right column if you want to retain the above-the-fold placement. That way you provide left and right hand navigation and center the ad placement on the page, without looking like you're overworking the table of contents. A little more white space and a little less contrast between the background/presentation areas will make it a lot easier on the eyes. And a more consistent presentation of the movie titles and descriptions would make a user more likely to read the entire timeline. I think the idea is great. It's a nice site.
I dont want to be harsh, but i have to be honest. Too me it looks like you pasted magazine articles to the screen. Too much white, and I would add some kind of framing in the main content area. Also maybe add a gradient to the Background.
Thanks for the helpful input, I'll definitely implement some of your suggestions. Your right about the colors, I gotta find a better color scheme. I was trying to place the movies to look similar to other Timelines that I've seen, which are usually all over the place with notations, but it is kind of clumsy. I'm so used to my templates having a left border navigation that I just naturally place them there, but maybe I don't need a left border at all??
Honesty is helpful. I kind of see what you mean about it looking like a magazine article. Are you saying that it looks like that because there's too much white space or because of something else? Thanks, for the feedback.
White space has a lot to do with it plus I think its the lack of uniformity, each article is a different size and color. Even the borders, some are black some green, some not there. The main thing that bothers me is the feeling of transparency between each block. I think where needs to be a different color to separate the main content area from the background color. to be honest i have always found that annoying, i hate visiting sites that have that. Yours isn't too bad because there is a decent delay. Some sites have it setup so that it pops up immediately, and that's really annoying.
hmm its lil blury :/ maybe somehing simple would be better, and maybe some bigger movie pictures when u roll over
Pretty good website idea, but design needs more works. Usually I surf many similar concept websites to get ideas for the design.
I love the content and the concept. The design looks a little amateur. It's not bad, just needs some more elbow grease.
The banner seems to be blury looking, also the web-page scrolls sideways. These are two things I would correct for a start.
Yeah, this is new ground for me. All of my other sites are usually template based and I don't have think that much about it. I want this site to be outstanding when it's finished tho, because I like movies and so it makes it easy to work on. I know it's not that polished up yet, and yeah it looks a bit amateur, but that's why I wanted your guy's help before I dug myself too deep of a hole, and have to start over from scratch or some shit! lol. I just put about 13 straight hours of work into it (all-nighter), utilizing all of the feedback and comments I got here, and I think people will digg it on the next go-around. Thanks for checking out the site and for your comments.
I think it's a great idea, to be entirely honest, you've given me some interesting ideas for "timelines". A few particular touches and it should do well if you market it.
Just to warn you, I can be a little harsh. Banner image is too tall pushing what people came to the page for - content - too far down the page. You don't have anything that really says "where" the user actually is (like a logo) making the page feel incomplete. You've got absurdly undersized fixed metric fonts for an accessibility /FAIL/ (I've seen this so much the past week, is there some central ****tard advocating this bullshit or something?) further compounded by the use of serif fonts - making pretty much all of it illegible unless I zoom in 50% or more. The textured backgrounds behind the text in the timeline also makes the text harder to read, and the absurdly wide non-fluid layout means that when I zoom in to legible levels, the page doesn't even fit on a 1920 wide display! You've got some inconsistent padding that looks more like rendering errors than intentional design (like the lack of a gap from the black full-width bar and the content below it, or that the gap between the column and content area is twice that of the sidebar items).... same goes for the footer rendering narrower than the content. The only validation errors are unescaped ampersands - big deal... But we peek under the hood and whoever you've been learning HTML from needs a good smack with a wet trout. Tables for layout, presentational markup, CSS inlined in the markup... It's a train-wreck of monumental proportions; as evidenced by the 92k of HTML to deliver a mere 8k of text on the page; easily four to five times what should be neccessary and begging the question "What you you even have that 8k of CSS for?!?" Given the simplistic layout of the page, we also have to ask what you need 400k of images for? The biggest problem isn't just format compression (or lack therin) but that you didn't even resize the images to the size they'll be shown. The whole site is 660k in 64 files - I would seriously try to whittle that down to 150k or less in 30 files at minimum, and ideally get it below 100k and 16 files (though a LOT of your images would need an axe taken to them) Still, for a first time outing it's not horrid, though I have the feeling you are learning from a book written in 1997 or from someone who hasn't updated their skills in a decade or more.
You should really go for some redesign, overall looks are boring.. and the top portion seems to be low quality image.
Fonts! Get rid of that times new roman! Take a look at this article for some help with fonts in CSS: http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/eight-definitive-font-stacks
Well, I'd say your more than a little harsh. I'd say your an asshole, but that doesn't stop the fact that you make sense when it comes to websites. Anyways, I've made a shit load of changes based on what everybody has said and I'm anxious to get some reactions. Keep in mind that it's not done yet. There are obvious content errors everywhere e.g. the same description for two different movies, but everything else should be 10 times better than the last version. Let's see what happens!!