Boyevul.net | a light at the end of the tunnel

Hey, thanks for looking at some other sites first!

Front page: too dark, can't see what the graphics are behind the text. Confusing, because I"m not sure what the site is or where I want to go.

Forum page: Logo graphic looks cut off along the edges and doesn't fit with the rest of the site. Blue links are *really* hard to read against a black background.

Great atmosphererics. I like the the sound rollovers a lot. The top background image was knocked back so far that it was a while before I noticed it. The piano image has too many background pixels still visible.

The logo in the guest book links to http://boyevul.net/main.html which truncates the right hand third of the page.

Fixing the height at about 400px seems really masochistic. I would give yourself some more space and increase the size of the blog text a bit.

Good stuff! I'm glad I saw it.

George

George Ashe
Quidham Computing Ltd
Golden Retriever - an Entirely New Class of PC Software from Quidham Computing

guestbook fixed

Looks okay, but I don'tlike how the main curser is the hand, doesn't seem natural.

You may want to get rid of that iFrame. But apart from that it looks very tidy. Maybe place some contrasting pictures to back up the dark theme of the website.

Sometimes dark is good.

I like it.

Keep it real

the iframe is where the content shows up, i dont know if you noticed that small detail

I think the design is nice -a little dark - but not majorly.

My concern is - it isn't obvious what the sites about straight away.
I think a lot of people would get to your first psge - click through it and then go. ok.... now what?

well thats what i did anyway, i may just be dumb.

I am a big fan of dark colors so I like the color scheme a lot. I agree with everyone on the "What is your site about?" thing, It is hard to tell if it is a general music site or a piano site.

iframe in a frame, hmmm

I dont have the flash plugin (and dont want it) so all I get is a grey box with an iframe fill of linked images (that keep the arrow cursor, not the hand as normal)

And it took a real long time to load that on dialup

if you'd click ??? it tells you what the site is about, ya know... and I,II, and III are the navigation from the flash menu.

sorry busy, but i'm workin on an html version only which shouldn't take too long - it's fairly simple to do.

It's unusable. With my brightness and contrast settings (just below 50% -- common, afaik), all I see in a dark box with some vague shapes barely visible in the middle. And some small white and yellow text about the place. I don't like the mystery meat navigation either. It is also near invisible, and I'm supposed to figure out that they're links. Links to what? Where do they open? Does my middle-click for new tab work on them? No sensible visual feedback when I hover them; they're ridiculously small targets and aren't in easily clickable hotspots.

What's all that text popping up when I move my cursor around? What am I hovering over? I can't even easily read that tiny text.

For whatever reason, I see a scrollbar in the little box bottom-right, but I can't scroll at all. Can't click the links in there (I'm assuming yellow means link). That irks me. I'm using Firefox 0.8.

Somehow I scrolled down the main window, and can't move back up. I think your flash and frames arrangement has completely mangled my scrolling. You're offending my intuition.

There are sounds? Can't hear them. I have music playing on audio... did I just download X extra kb for nothing?

From a usability standpoint, I do dislike the design.

flash is no longer there - I don't even know what's firefox is. what the hell are you talking about? somehow i think it's obvious that you should read the description in blog - it tells you how to navigate. and entering the site is rather easy - i have my resolution on the highest possible on a laptop - and i can make everything out very easily.

Firefox (0. - a browser by Mozilla. It's a fairly popular browser. Remember that not everyone uses IE.

Intuition is a key to making a page usable. You shouldn't have to instruct users by word how to use something that should be familiar to them.

Your resolution is not my resolution. Not everyone uses the same settings.

ive tested it in 800x600 and it fits perfectly

I thought you wanted opinions, Boyevul?

http://www.zerocattle.com/examples/images/boyevul.jpg

Ideally a site would be fairly navigable even if the text wasn't understandable. This is a case where more space vertically would really help the understanding of the site, instead of compressing everything with poor typography into a tiny space.

ok so let me get a list of the applications that do this - i've tested mine on my laptop at 800x600 and it fits.

what all could be causing this? is the text in the iframe not showing up?

The main design fits -- but the blue links (which are nearly impossible to read on the black, as noted previously, and are butt-ugly as well) wrap over top of text, et cetera.

This is in Safari (mac) for my screenshot, which displays nearly identically to everything but IE.

Part of the problem is that it's half-mysterious. In design there is a concept called the "grid". Basically humans find meaning in non-randomness, so if there are "sight lines" then it's easier to understand. It doesn't really matter if those lines are perpendicular or straight, but rather that they are clearly identifiable. The lines aren't actually THERE, but it's as if the content is following, leaning against a line.

In the main content area, there is a lack of "grid". It's very haphazard in appearance and this leads to more confusion that there would already be because you are using non-generic terms for your sections (which isn't necessarily bad, but it makes it more confusing when you have all these non-standard pieces together).

i was thinking about that - change the link color to yellow and move the top nav links down to the lighter area above "light at the end of the tunnel"??

ill try lemme know - gimme a minute

alright

Wow you guys are harsh... hahaha... just wanted to throw in that 800x600 is a HUGE resolution... Makes everything BIG... A more common ressy among those literate in computers is 1024x768 (or higher)... I personally use 1024x768 (which makes things smaller than in 800x600) because it allows more usage of space but it won't throw off the designs optimized for 800x600 by making them too small... Just my humble interjection, feel free to disregard...

i'm aware that 800x600 is a HUGE resolution. that's why I don't use that god awful number. i use 1680x1050 (which goes beyond 1024x768) but some of my family members as well as the common person who surfs but does not change his resolution from 800x600 use the rather large resolution.

Next, would love if you actually came here to review a website rather than throw definitions of things that are already known, ie 800x600 is big, 1024x768 is small. We get it.

Thank you for your humble interjection.

I like the look of the site, but I agree that it is a little hard to understand the navigation.

Sure it's easy for you to see. What about your users?

Screenshot with annotations.

The biggest problem I have with that is that you want me to use IE on 1024x768. I'm on Linux; there is no IE for Linux. I use Firefox, with a screen resolution of 1280x1024, and the browser occupying only a part of that. Even many Windows users choose to use alternate browsers and resolutions. That's a freedom users like to have. Don't force your users to do something against their will, or else they'll simply click away.

The scrollbars also illustrate, to me, clearly, that you don't care what I, the user, I confronted with. This isn't simply aesthetic, though. My scrollwheel suddenly becomes very limited -- a little more uncomfortable to use.

The blue links are still difficult to see off mouseover. Again, instead of being cryptic and unfriendly by camouflaging your links, it would be wise to present them clearly and readably. This goes for the grey text too.

I'm not really concerned about the image, even though I made a note of it. It's non-essential, so even if I turned up my monitor's brightness, I wouldn't care for it much.

Finally, as a general design comment, notice how much screen space I'm letting you have. Don't waste it by locking frames into a small area. (This is a matter of preference.)

I'm glad you're willing to make changes. This revision is an improvement to the original, but there is still room for improvement. Just remember that you have to go at least halfway to satisfy users and their needs. Be a little more user-centric.

I got rid of the frames - at least you gave me a screen shot instead of just ***** and complain like alot of these other people are.

but judging from your screenshot, I could make everything out very clearly, and so could be a VISUALLY IMPAIRED PERSON THAT WAS PASSING BY whilst I was at the local library.

I'm not yelling at you - I'm tired. I've redesigned so many times because so many different people complained about so many different things, and every time I tried to suit one person, the other people complained.

The div layers should adjust themselves accordinly; I tested it in 800x600. The image however is staying - I work a long long time on my images and I likes what I keeps.

The original had three frames (the index was broken into frames) and the page loaded into the middle, but I got the same effect from div layers and centering with the proper code.

And to the people who go there to simply complain and offer no constructive criticism (unlike people like Abhishek Reddy) thank you for nothing.

Again, thank you Reddy, your footnotes and accompanying screenshot were very HELPFULL in providing what my website looks like on browsers that I would probably never either a)have heard of or b)use due to my own personal preference.

that's funny, it never happened on any of the machines i was using. ever. but i took the pop ups off simply because that does not sound like a good thing.

thank you for pointing this problem out

its cool - thanks for pointing it out to me. what browser are you using, anyway?

you need to use the width and height tags on ALL images, very jumpy on dialup.

In Mozilla (firebird), all I get is all the little link icons in the middle of the page, and an affiliate link about pop ups up top, and your banner up the very top, where is your navigation?

Remember everyone offers their 2cents trying to help out, don't stress.
At least consider all suggestions given (as you have) because looking at a site from a designers perspective is totally different to a viewers one. It's a tough lesson to learn (and except) but is worth remembering.

you actually have to enter the website; click on ENTER BOYEVUL. that's why that is there.

lemme know after you enter site - but yeah, the entrance i guess was kind of hard to realize for some reason

get rid of the click here to enter site link, its hard to see

where is the "ENTER BOYEVUL" link?

Is it the banner? I can't read it and with all those link icons don't know if it's your banner or just another link.
ok, I see you added the text link now

Just had a look at your html, its a mess, you have:
and tags.

Same problem on the blog page, but you have 3 body tags and some extras.
The blog os split 50/50 and the text is really small, make the split at least 80/20

Your not using Frontpage by any chance are you?
Validate your code and you may find it sors out a lot of things.

I've included a partical screen capture of the top section of your site (will remove in a few days) [edit]removed[/edit]

its php -

doesnt show up when you view the source
and no, i code it all by hand in notepad

Dude, if you're including files the END RESULT has to look right.

It's not like with frames where each section is a complete page in its own right. You have to imagine how things fit within the greater whole when you use includes. You're not even closing the page!

how about everybody stop viewing my source and just tell me if the design works? i know all about my code - i did it by hand!

I believe your HTML is affecting your layout, bad code does this. Check your site in any browser apart from IE (which allows nearly any style of coding) and you may see what we see.

If you don't have any other browsers let us know and we'll show you some screen captures of your pages.

Like a house, you need a solid foundation, which in this case is the code.
If the foundation is flakey the house, or page can and will fall down.

let me get some screen caps

You've changed the layout, is kinda looking similar in IE, Mozilla and Opera now.

Load time is still a little slow

You still haven't fixed your code thou. This could be effecting your load time.
You have so many body, html, head and link tags etc the browser is guessing what to put, here are some of your body tags from your index page

They are in this order. the last one is usually what most people would see, which doesn't have a background image.

you do have one set of but is half way down the page under the "For more information, feel free to ...." bit.
the most concerning bits are your most of them are around images but some are before some of the tags and others, I have no idea where the end tags are.

I'm only bringing this to your attention to help you, validating your code isn't hard, if you have Opera, open the page or right click in the frame page and choose frame/validate source, or go to w3c.org and upload the page.
It doesn't even have to be 100% valid, just right would be a big load off the browser and better for the viewer as at the moment is a shake of the dice what is seen.

alright cool - i also made a different layout for the artwork section as well as added a new downloadable layout ... its fairly simple, but it's nifty!

what about navigation and the layout itself, not the coding. I want suggestions on the code, but I'd rather have comments on the layout itself.

Thanks busy - as I don't have enough time again right now to go through all of that php, I made it so that all three php files had the background attribute so it should show up

thats your problem, your included php files.

main file:

the title
meta tags, css, javascript or whatever

php included file:
or whatever

NO html, head, css files, title, body tags in your included files.
Your included files are like .css or .js files, they don't have start or end tags included in them

The font is a little small on opera and mozilla which makes it hard to read, your also not using the full width of the screen. In some ways your trying to hard to do a simple layout. You could just do something like this for your main page

...

<? include banner or top section file ?>

<? include main section file ?>
<? include navgation or whatever file ?>

<? include footer or whatever file ?>

Thats it, and in your included files you just put the actual content, the table holds the layout together so needs nothing in the files for that, they are included php files so can't be accessed directly anyway, unlike your frame pages. This template can be used through out your whole site just changing the included file names, even the template above could be a file which with one change could change the whole sites layout.
The above could also be done without tables, by using CSS but I reckon tables are more stable (folks will disagree with this).

Remember KISS (keep it simple silly), most often than not simple is easier and better.

thanks but thanks for looking at my code again. i realize there are problems with the code- but as stated on the site - "this website is never truly "finished", but always "growing" - meaning more and more content will be added, meaning that the space will eventually fill - right now I'm just wanting comments on the design.

the graphics aspect - the actual CONTENT of the site, like the articles and the artwork. i want to know what people think about that...

Every site is "unfinished", and there is more to a site than how it looks.

The splash page (first page) is a waste of time, all you have is a banner (your banner) and links, your banner is being confused as an affiliate link so people wont bother going any further.
IMO loose the first page, you can easily place all your little link buttons on other pages - even across the bottom or a seperate page that is linked to, not from.
It's just a blog so you can do as you please, if you want people to see it you have to think about it from the viewers point of view, not yours. Remember we make sites for others, not ourselves (If you just want it for yourself start a scrapbook)
You have to think about things like how does it look at 800x600, how about 1300Xwhatever? can the font be read easily ... and it comes back down to your code, your foundation. If that can't support your design how can you tell what people will see. If people see a webpage having a bad hair day they don't usually return. You need to give them a reason to return, why is your blog any better than the millions of others out there? I know your answer, the index shouts it, its saying "make me money" by use of affiliate links. Don't trick people into clicking them, they may do it once but never again, make them want to click them and not only will they return they may also click your links again.
Don't think money first, think other peoples pleasure, then money.
Betend I have a blog (I don't), think about what would attract you to it, now you may be thinking bells and whistles so also think about what would interest your mother or father to my blog.
Do a search for blogs etc and see if you can figure out what the top 5 have in common with each other and how they are different to yours.

Quote: (If you are here only to write a stupid ****ing review about how my top image is crappy, or the link boxes are lame, or whatever other comments you can think of, politely press the x button now.

No thanks. I'll middle-click my tab instead.

Why the anger? No one attacked you in any post in this thread. From what I see, all critics dispensed very useful info. This, as I said before, is a critique forum. Approach, intention, style, code, design, appearance, usability, accessibility, and validity, are a few of the aspects that people may comment on. It's not personal; reviewers try to be helpful, in good spirit.

If you don't care to listen positively to requested reviews, what chance is there of you caring about your users?

lol, yeah there's content... i've been morphing the design around and around and around - no splash page, goes straight into the content - the html is CLOSED off now, so the tags are present, and all of the code should be correct and acurate - i'll check it on that website in a sec.

the nav is on the left, everything fits in 800x600 - hmm... lemme think, what else... I'm pretty sure it should be viewable in all browsers

going on previous experience, anybody using an iMac (yeah, an imac...) I'm pretty sure that its going to cause some problems, but whenever i lived with my family in 2000 we had an imac and iexplorer was on it. anyway, we had aol and both aol and iexplorer crashed CONSTANTLY as well as didn't show anything properlly.

Any other problems still persisting?

I'm running a mac (eMac and iBook) and it works dandy. Much better than before by far.

Still pretty unclear what the goal is, but hey, personal sites can be that way.

alrighty, that sounds really good - I don't know if it was just the iMac that was having the problems or what, but I would have problems like constantly being disconnected from aol (even though we had the options set so it wouldn't) and then the os would crash every few hours with some weird message, and then sometimes it wouldn't even connect at all and tell me that it couldn't detect a dial tone even though it was clearly plugged into the wall.. so .. maybe it was just iMac because i've heard good things about all of the other mac products (except for iMac! go figure... personally i think of them as nothing more than a very expensive accessory to a room (i had a friend back home who got one because he said and i quote "it was cute"... same thing with my step mom..) anyway, thanks for that feedback -

the site has always been about one thing: and that's everything! any and everything that interests me somehow and i feel like putting it on the page it will be on there.

FYI saying an iMac is bad is like saying a PC is bad. It's just hardware. The operating system makes a huge difference regarding reliability and AOL isn't exactly the top of the heap on connectivity, more like the opposite... If it was running OS9 and AOL, there have been incompatibilities because AOL stopped developing for Macintosh entirely for a few years, then came back with development for OSX because it was significantly easier to do so and the market share has increased.

no i meant it might have been just my imac - but i just generally dont like imacs to begin with

Ah, gotcha.

I had an old one (blueberry) but I decided against the swivelhead when I purchased the eMac. Nice small footprint, though.

so its looking better now??

It is! The iframes continue to be problematic, though -- for some reason I ignore them and then realize belatedly that's where the navigation is. Then when I click on links, the link sizes change, which is disorienting.

When going through the content, there doesn't seem to be particularly good markup applied -- links are visually jumbled and there isn't a good sense of what they are.

All the affiliate links and such on the side are really off-putting.

There isn't much padding on the side columns, which makes the text seem squashed up on the edges and makes it less enjoyable to read, which is probably why I'm ignoring it.

any suggestions?

Don't put navigation in iframes.
Provide context for the buttons.
Use good structural markup (lists) for lists.
Don't change the font size of hyperlinks depending on their state.
Add padding to the columns.
Use headings and be explicit in your content (i.e. clear, not adult... )

lol - i changed the links over to an expandable list back beside the content - hopefully that will be easier to navigate. I'm working on everything right now - ie cleaning up broken links to other sites and all that good stuff

had to re-edit. the php coding was bad (duh! i know!) anyway, let me know if this re-edit works or not. thanks

is this new one showing up alright for everybody? i'm getting an error but i cant figure it out - i think its the menu, but once i tested it, and selected one of the items it was okay again so it might be on the opening page within the ... arghh... anyway, does this show up okay for everybody?

You love your iframes don't you.

If you tell us your error your getting we might be able to help sort it.

I think you have gone from bad to worse, now on 800x600 you have to scroll down to the iframe's contents (can't use mouse wheel as that moves the iframe), and if you do use your mouse wheel to scroll through the iframe it jumps the page up or down depending which way you go and you have to use the scroll bar again.
The text and iframe are a very small part of the browsers window, probably not even a quater of it, use the space.

found out the error - it was one of the button exchanges.

ehh... kinter, I removed that from the webpage about a month ago. the thing that ran the so called malicous code was called by popuptraffic.com.

i've also got a download in "other" called Hijack This that removes all spyware. trust it if you want, you'll be the one to make that judgement.