Feedback on my new design please!

Just put it up, the space where the welcome message is contains lots of nice little buttons when members view topics and stuff.

http://www.geek4ums.com/

Please, any feedback or suggestions are appreciated.

 

Good design, but it would be better if you use glossy buttons for the top menu.

 

Looks good. Though, the links in the welcome box are quite unreadable (it's dark grey on black), you should change the links in that box only.

 

Some people are telling me the site is loading really slow. Is anybody else having that problem? I think it might be because of the filters I had to put it to make PNG images work in IE6.

Did you know IE6 will not show PNG transparency without special filters coded into the CSS?

 

Looks all right but I have to agree with Celoxdesign that dark gray on black hmm not the best and the top menu also have a little problem: the JOIN drops down a line if u increase the font size which is has possibility after the gray balck problem mentioned above.
Otherwise I like the black bg.
congrat

don't know for sure but the dropping JOIN menu item might be the result of the spaces in the code between <a> and <img> tags

 

did take a little to load.. I'm using FireFox on PClinuxOs... looks good for the market you are targeting...

Good Job!
Lhlalyam

 

Totally agreed.

 

Well, it is indeed slow - and going to be quite slow for a number of reasons.

The BIGGEST reason being it's 405k in 79 files. From here I'm getting ping times averaging 139ms - that means that for me the MINIMUM page load time on first visit to your site is going to be around 22 seconds even if I get my max throughput of 600k/sec. Dialup users are looking at somewhere around two minutes load time. (about 74 seconds for the file sizes, and about 47 seconds for handshaking)

With Firefux holding downloads to waste time rendering as the images become available, that extra overhead totals up to around 20-30 seconds for a page that on my connection should only take about two.

Image recombination for things like the menu could probably both shrink your filesizes, and allow you to have mouseover states.

You've got some images as .gif that would be smaller as .png, several other images that could be combined down to single elements in the same or smaller file sizes. I'm willing to bet you could probably shave about 40 images off the page without changing the appearance, and about 100k off the total size.

Of course the stupid bloated inlined CSS is a true telltale of phpBB, as is the absurd amount of inlined .js for little or no functionality. Of course, the 70k of CSS is also 'typical' of phpBB and little more than bloat - combine this with phpBB's security holes big enough to float the USS IOWA through and we have why I generally consider phpBB a total pile of crap.

Visually the page is appealing in color choice, but the fixed px font sizes in completely unusable sizes is a total /FAIL/, as is the fixed width for a forums. But then, being phpBB that's pretty much par for the course (there's a reason I have a opera user.css designed JUST to override the font sizes on phpBB based websites)

My advice remains, as it was the last time you put this up for review - ditch phpBB and get a good forum software MEANT to be skinned like vBulletin or SMF.

 

I was looking at it...and there was no reason for me to be using images for the menu, so I recoded it and went with text. Also fixed the links in the welcome message.

 

I would by scared off by the layout and logo.

 

good job

 

looks good, loaded fast for me, nice overall design and content.... Good Job

 

Umm...if you say something like that, can you please give reasoning? Otherwise, your post is useless to me, and not contributing the the purpose of the topic at all.

 

I like the gray on black - the page loaded fast for me - Nice job.

 

nice job on the template i like it a lot good job

 

Thank you guys. Is anybody running 1024x768? I want to make sure theres no horizontal scrollbar in 1024x768.

 

There you're ok. You've got about 24px of the grey striped background showing on each side of the content and no scrollbar.

 

Thanks. Do you guys still design for 800x600? I haven't for a while.

 

The logo seems highly unprofessional and if I was looking for a geek forum to participate in I would be looking for professionalism. Same goes for the thumbnails next to the forum topics, like the O Rly bird.


Although it seems your audience doesn't think like I do since you have lots of posts, or maybe you would have had even more posts with a more professional theme and logo.

 

Well, as a rule I don't design to a fixed width unless the client REALLY has their heart set on it. To me, the 'crappy little stripe' design is a total /FAIL/ because nobody runs the same size displays... and I make this crazy assumption...

If the user sets the screen to 1600px wide, then they want to see the page 1600px wide not as some crappy little 960px or less wide stripe. Otherwise, why the hell are they running the screen that large (but then, I've been running 1600x1200 for over a decade now, and multiple displays for seventeen odd years)

Likewise with the advent of mobile devices with smallscreens - 800 across is still the norm on ultra-mobiles like the Samsung Q1 or Asus R2 - one really shouldn't give up 800 support yet.

Even when a client 'demands' something that would a fixed width layout, I usually try to go semi-fluid so that it can adjust from 600 to 1000px dynamically using min-width/max-width (and the IE 'calculated' equivalents)

To me, any fixed width is a total /FAIL/ at design on usability and accessability grounds... as are fixed size fonts in 12px or less, inadequate padding between text and borders, low line-heights, and a host of other common yet bad practices.