Hey everyone. Me and a few friends/colleagues are starting a web design/development business, which will be covering web design, forum design, graphic design, web hosting and more. I'd like some feedback on the design, and the business idea in general. Here is what I originally designed for the homepage: http://i.imgur.com/5sJJlkf.png I spent the past few days coding it, it's still not quite finished but it's about 95% complete: http://www.intoxdesign.net/demo/ All type of feedback is welcome! Thanks.
Nice, but too much "dark" for my taste Actually not only to "my taste", read some web design usability case-studies so You will see what I am talking about...Just my 2 cents. Start from here: http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2009/09/24/10-useful-usability-findings-and-guidelines/
Yeah a couple of other people don't like the white text on dark background either, but that's really to do with personal taste I think. I personally love it. I could maybe add a "light" option which could be toggled via a button or something. Thanks for the link, that#s quite useful actually. I've made some updates to the demo site, feedback would be appreciated on the new addition of the social links. Got a feeling people may find the glow too intense. Also added the ability to change the color scheme to either blue/green/red and will be adding more colors. Changed the minimum font size from 10px to 12px. Still need to remove the contact form on the homepage, any ideas what I could replace it with? http://www.intoxdesign.net/demo/ Cheers
Ok, you started off working from a goofy picture of a website before you had semantic markup or a layout built in CSS, so it's likely a bandwidth hogging inaccessible train wreck... Let's see... Inaccessible fixed width too big for my netbook and too small for my desktop... illegible undersized fixed metric (px) fonts, goofy looking webfonts, space and bandwidth wasting rotating image garbage, and hard to read color contrasts with the black on blue areas (likely below accessibility minimums) -- multiple design elements that pretty much FORCE it to be a useless fixed width as well. Let's peek under the hood. At an ungodly 2.8 MEGABYTES it is twenty times larger than the upper limit I'd allow for a page with so little legitimate content. Size-wise the markup and CSS isn't bad, but mein gott swing an axe at some (if not ALL) of those images. Of course that it's chock full of that idiotic bloated nonsense known as jquery is hardly a shock these days -- your scripting alone being four times the size I'd allocate for HTML+CSS+IMAGES+SCRIPTS in the template. (and twice the upper limit -- admittedly jquery ALONE is two thirds my ideal total size). The markup is filled to the brim with nonsensical invalid and just plain broken code -- to the point I'm shocked you're able to get it to render properly in ANY browser ... from putting anchors AROUND LI (completely invalid), endless pointless DIV for Christmas only knows what, tables for layout on the form, complete lack of labels on the form and instead that counterintuitive 'swap the label out' scripting garbage, attributes like TARGET that have no business being used on websites written after 1997, no MEDIA targets on the CSS LINKs, inlined STYLE (I had my way the style tag would be obsoleted and the attribute would be deprecated)... and of course the document itself being a tranny -- which is to say it's proudly proclaiming on the first line to be in "transition" from 1997 to 1998 coding practices. It's just another laundry list of everything WRONG with how people are making websites today; particularly in the age of an even wider array of device capabilities making responsive layout THE way to build sites... Though that's a concept typically lost on the "let's draw a goofy picture in photoshop of something not actually practical to be a website first" crowd. Kind of a laugh from what's supposed to be a "High end design service".
Thanks for the in-depth analysis. You have an interesting style of writing, lol. It is pretty common practice to design the complete layout in photoshop first, and then work on the markup and css. The fixed width of 940px is only just below the most common widths of 951px - 1000px as noted in the article linked by signorm68 above (http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2009/09/24/10-useful-usability-findings-and-guidelines/). If it is too big for your netbook I would imagine there are many other sites which are also too big for it. That's a problem with your netbook, and any other small devices with low resolutions. Not sure what you're referring to when you say I'm wasting bandwidth by rotating images? Ok you got me there, I need to work on reducing the image sizes and the website size in total. There's a lot of javascript on the page which isn't neccessery, the files are left over from a previous project I worked off. I need to remove them. There are only a couple of cases of javascript being used on the site. As for my scripting size, I guess I still have some things left to learn. You said earlier that my markup and css wasn't bad. Pretty sure you are exaggerating, the code really isn't that bad. If it renders well in all major browsers the issue isn't as big as you are making it out to be. I will check the errors with http://validator.w3.org and fix them up. Many people have given positive comments about the website, it might not currently be perfect, but that's why I made this thread. To say "it's a laugh" is a bit far. But again, thanks for taking the time to respond.