Government-related website for review

Firstly, I like your design, but it's missing something very important, a background colour, never assume that it's going to be white, or if you forgot, put it in there

Secondly, try adding a bit more padding into your news and content areas, it looks very packed and kind of busy there, you might also want to increase the line spacing too.

Lastly, move the "Web Design by T&S Web Design" to the middle of the box, it looks a bit weird right aligned.

Very nice site, I like it

Pretty good. I personally don't like overflowing DIVs, but if it's purely an informative site, it's not bad. Good luck.

Myself I think too much space is wasted on the menu and title image. Not frienly for 800x600 viewers.

I would have the external links open in a new window, or at least give the option to choose that.

There were two links that when you clicked on them, the only content was to "follow this link" to see the actual content. (MRO Tech, Tinker AFB)

On my laptop, until i adjusted the tilt of the display, I could not tell a difference between regular text and links within the regular text due to the colors being so close. (see Workforce Education page). Even with screen adjusted for best contrast, was still hard for me to tell.

-Greg

I like the design, the colors could use some work(more colors maybe?). The navigation is layed out pretty well. I don't like the boxes(sorry, drawing blank on name) where you have your content, the page should just continue to get longer as you add more content. I don't like the blue bars on either side of the page, they standout too much and don't serve a purpose. Remember, websites are meant to be informative, serve a purpose,and not just to look pretty. Good luck.

Thanks for the additional comments.

Greg:

Yeah, I thought that having the page's content be just a couple of external links wasn't the best idea. But that's what the client wanted.

Thanks for pointing out the links color issue. Since the blue matches the rest of the blue on the site, I'll probably change it so that the links are underlined, then maybe change color to the standard blue when hovered over.

Lucas:

I have to admit that I generally don't like the overflow: auto option that makes longer content scroll. This is only the second time I've used it. However, I thought it worked well with this particular design.

The blue bars actually do serve a purpose. They're there to help frame the content of the page. But I appreciate your letting me know you don't like them.

I'm getting a big horizontal scrollbar when resized to 800x600 in Opera. I agree that too much space is taken up by the header and navigation area. And then the content is in the overflox boxes which just adds clutter and makes things confusing to the eye.

In general this site is quite confusing to me. Everything is very choppy visually and it's hard to get a clear idea of what this is all about. The elements are not related to each other in a way that makes sense. For example, navigation and content should be related to each other but they're not, they're in opposite corners of the layout.

The graphic quality and overal layout design here is quite poor. The logo has way too many effects on it - it looks like something from the mid to late 90's. The "among the top six" line underneath there looks like it was staggered for the sake of taking up space, not because it was a good design idea.

One small thing - I find the dark blue links hard to pick out within blocks of text. They should be brighter and/or have an underline. With a site like this you'll probably get a lot of newbie type visitors who might not even realize that links might not be underlined.

I do generally like the navbar. The gradient and right alignment have a nice effect.

Thanks for the comments Megan. I'm already planning on adjusting the links so they stand out more, thanks to Greg's comment above.

I hate to rely on statistics, but aren't something like 75% of people now above 800x600? At what point do you make the switch to primarily designing for a larger resolution?

I'm not a big fan of the logo myself, but it was designed by a seperate design firm and supplied to me by the client. It's the one thing I can't change at all. Unfortunately, it has to be kept fairly big to be readable, which led to several of the design decisions you didn't agree with.

http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2005/September/res.php

You'd have to check your own stats but 23% is a lot. Especially when you're cutting off important parts of the design (such as content and logo). If this layout was reversed with the news on the right side it might be better.

Also, just because the resolution says one thing doesn't mean that people are actually using 100% of the screen width. I've got my windows taskbar on the right and opera panels on the left so my browser width is only about 800px. Most of the time I like it this way too, although I've been fiddling with different configurations that might work and give me a wider browser width. I know a lot of people at really high resolutions don't maximize windows. Most web pages don't work at widths above 1200 px or so.

Eeew, that's a bad logo situation. They paid for that ?!?!?!? Yikes! You could try to get a source file from the originating firm which might help, or try to convince them to re-do it! A logo like that is a big problem because you wouldn't be able to use it in other publications or resize it or anything. Something like that would never work in print.

Last few times I did an install of Windows 98 or XP, they defaulted to 800x600. I had to manually change them to be higher.

Plus, out of that 75%, how many browse at full screen? It drives me nuts to be helping someone on their computer and they have a browser window only open to like 50%-75% of their screen and scroll all around!!!

-Greg

As far as the screen resolution/page width size, I prefer to use a fixed width and set it so it would fill up a 800x600 screen. Then it will fit in any resolution higher than that. And since there will be some negative space at high res. try adding some sort of background image that doesn't take away from the site but hides the empty areas.

Just some ideas...

The design is nice good colour usage, blue and white always goes together.

Well done add more content on the front page i think.

I like the design, really i cant find anything bad to say...........

Thanks everyone, for your suggestions. I implemented the ones I wanted to, as is always the case. Let's face it, a critique is generally someone else's opinion of your site. I say, take what you want from critiques and feel free to ignore the rest. After all, you should have your own opinion too.

Seriously, you guys pointed out several things that I realized the client would probably point out too. So I appreciate it greatly.

Feel free to check it out again and ask me why I did anything the way I did, including (possibly) ignoring a specific criticism you gave it.

http://tinyurl.com/cqd6l

It is possible to do a fixed width at about 750px-760px, and float it and center it, so that at either resolutions itll automatically center (like my site)...

Design wise I like your use of subtle shadows, the banner where the logos are are really that big and imposing, can it be reduced?, the text on that banner on the blue strip looks jagged, and the logo looks a little b-rated... Anyways the implementation of iframes here are really quite appropriate, some minor adjustments will do the trick, also the gray you used can be much lighter as well as the blues...

Nice site all in all, although a few things still that i don't like on it - obviously you have an idea of how you want it to look but here's my 2 cents' worth :

That colour photo you have in the bottom right, it does look good there but it looks stretched to fill that gap, you'd have been better cropping to fit it rather than stretching.

The tag-line you have 'AMONG THE TOP SIX GLOBAL HUBS FOR AEROSPACE/AIRCRAFT MRO' that could easily be an image file, all in a row, nice anti-aliased font, probably would be about 2-3kb in size and would look infinitely better imo. The way it's laid out now doesn't look neat to me.

Obviously, the overflowing DIVs have been commented on before and you seem happy with them so no point in adding anything else about them here.

I would definitely try to convince them to get that logo re-done, not only is it ugly but it's pretty limiting and because of the size you're a little 'top heavy'.

Overall it's nice though mate!

Actually, the color photo is not stretched. It doesn't look stretched to me, but I've been staring at it for awhile.

The 'Among the top six...' originally was an image file. I changed it to save bandwidth, but now that you mentioned it, I may change it back. If only I weren't such a perfectionist...

Unfortunately, the logo is a very recent purchase. That, and I'm still getting to know this client, so I probably do too much urging on that front yet.

Glad you like it, DaveyBoy.