Please rate my web application design.

File is uploaded, please tell me what you think.
Does it look bad?
It would be the back end to a web application, not really a website.

BTW. if your username on this forum is deathshadow, than no. i don't want your opinion, don't post anything on this thread.

 

This design to me is too busy and not very polished. I feel like the textures are competing with one another too much and the navigational elements are cluttered. It's also a bit too late 90s for my taste.

 

I was thinking the same thing, do you think i should kill the sidebars? maybe only go with one sidebar at a time?

 

Is that designed to handle responsive and semi fluid layout? Is it elastic with dynamic fonts? do you have an actual working site or are you still just wasting time playing around in photoshop?

That said, you've got illegible color contrasts below accessibility norms -- You are familiar with the emissive luminance formula and how to use it to determine legibility, right? 50% contrast bare minimum, 70% or more ideal?

L = 0.3*R + 0.59*G + 0.11*B

That's the emissive formula as found in the WCAG, the VGA specification, and the joint usability study done as a joint project between IBM, Apple and Microsoft at the end of the '80's.

Black should result in zero, but thanks to font smoothing (and ignoring the artifacting on your jpeg) realistically it ends up blurred on the font in question up to more around 8,16,32 (ballparking off the screenshot)-- which works out to around 15.

The cyan-ish blue you are using is 88,155,181, which works out to an emissive luminance of 137

137 - 15 = 127, almost exactly the 50% minimum. Really colors that are have a luminacne ranging between 112 and 144 should be avoided for backgrounds or text from an accessibility standpoint, as it's too difficult to get a color far enough away from it contrast-wise, particularly with rendering like cleartype on the board.

Like a great number of things, it's all in the math.

The large background raises worries that it would be too massive to be real world deployable unless you don't care about phone users, tablet users, people who are on bandwidth restricted connections, etc, etc... That 'bar' that's different halfway through also looks more like a rendering error than intentional design. In general it's image heavy and very pretty, but not something I'd consider web deployable.

Same goes for the massive slider nonsense at the top pushing the things people actually visit the website for -- CONTENT, below the fold. Things like that are like the old Wendy's commercials.

It's a big bun. A big fluffy bun... A really BIG fluffy bun...
WHERE'S THE BEEF?!?

The inconsistent use of font is also distracting and not what I'd call good practice, in particular since on the headings you'd be adding even more pointless bloat through the use of web fonts (unless those would be images which is even worse). As my dearly departed friend, former apprentice who became the master, (and borderline web development legend) Dan Schulz would have said, "pick a font, not your nose."

Though that's hard to call too since the pretty paint program doesn't render fonts the same way browsers do.

The plate images in the first two inner columns of the center column make the headings look like garbage; particularly with what they do to the headings for those sections -- I'd either enlarge and center them, get rid of them altogether, or put them one over the other instead of side-by-side. The last of those would probably be what I'd do there, MAYBE making them multi-column in the semi-fluid/responsive design when there's twice that available width for them. That you don't have real content and cannot predict their future content size would further make me lean that direction.

So to sum up: fix the color contrasts, make some revisions to make it a wee bit more ready for fluid and responsive layout (possibly axing the twin equal height columns in the content area), swing an axe at the excessively large presentational images that are really going to be too big to even have on a website in the first place, shink that header area to around 192 pixels tall losing the space wasting bandwidth wasting script reliant image rotator nonsense... Yeah, I think that's about it.

Now,for all that, I've seen far, far worse, particulary at the 'dicking around in photoshop' stage of development. I'd be able to dial it in a lot more if it was an ACTUAL template where we could see how or even if it responds to different default font size settings, how it handles different widths, if it's viable for responsive layout or not, etc, etc... But that's why I don't design in Photoshop or any other paint program -- as if you care about accessibility it should be at the END of the process, not the start.

The others are saying it feels too busy, and I think that's more a lack of consistent padding and insufficient contrasts -- you fix those the complaints should evaporate.

 

My thread clearly states for you to NOT post in my thread.
Which goes to show that you write books as forum posts that no one reads, and never read the full OP first yourself.
and yes. dumb ass. its already a fully dynamic theme. go kill yourself.

for everyone else.
the template can be found here: http://shufordtech.com/bb1/
try re-scaling your browser. it will auto remove slide show, and edit CSS to fit mobile devices.

 

You do know we can see the edit history, right? Nice of you to add "not deathshadow" AFTER I replied...

Trying to give you serious advice based on things like the WCAG, and I'm the troll... RIGHT. Have fun with that.

P.S. your live copy is busted at pretty much every size on large fonts here, and you've got some buggy float collisions as it narrows.

 

view the history than stupid.

1. Edit at:
   Yesterday at 9:51 PM
2. Your Post: Today

 

are you even checking the same post?

http://www.cutcodedown.com/for_others/howDoYou/postEditHistory.jpg

Original post, edited TODAY at 2:22

Text added to post AFTER I replied highlighted in green by this forum software:
http://www.cutcodedown.com/for_others/howDoYou/postRevisionComparison.jpg

But I'd expect that type of fashionable fiction from someone using 14k of markup to do 9k's job, 81k of CSS to do 20k or less' job, and 180k of Javascript to do 15k's job even retaining the slideshow... just saying. Yeah. I'm the stupid one.

Nice attempt at lying through your teeth though, I applaud the effort, but your delivery could use some work.

 

I like the graphic in the background, but the fonts are way too bad. Change them with something Arial oriented for the content ...

 

Yeah I may have gotten a bit carried away with the fonts. Thanks for the feedback.

 

Lmfao.
Check the times dip shit.

 

I think it's a nice template.

Most people who use templates will make their own adjustments to it in any case.

 

Oh, thank you.
I changed the font around so they are more "standard web fonts", and removed most of the side bars so it looks less cluttered.
If you can think of any more please let me know.