My business site..

There's a few pages not made yet, so ignore them. They will look like the rest when done.

Quote: Originally posted by tmay
We just wanted a clean, easy to navigate, professional looking site.

I think you've got exactly what you want. It looks good.

Just a few things:

- some sideways scroll at 800x600

- your photos would look better as jpgs

- your icons seem to beg for some mouseover activity? maybe not.

- at higher res (1152x864 for example) everything is contained by fixed width EXCEPT the nav icons. This looks a little odd to me.

good work!

Thank you. That wasn't as bad as I expected.

About the sideways scroll: I saw that when I was making it and just never worried about it.

About the pictures: We had them as .jpgs first, but they were bigger in size and took several more seconds to load. So we made them .gifs and realized that they were smaller in size (which loaded faster) AND didn't lose any quality. We even tested them on the web and put one of each side by side and compared the quality. There was no quality loss whatsoever, so of course we went with the ones that loaded faster.

About the mouseover effects: I thought about doing something like that, but in the end we agreed not to do it. We want a website that everybody sees the same thing, not a few people with THIS browser, and maybe a few people with THAT browser type thing. So, we agreed to keep it simple and clean.

About the higher res problem with the nav icons: This I want to fix! I think I know what you are talking about and will work on it ASAP. I thought I made everything the same but I guess I didn't. Now, correct me if I'm wrong here...if I make all the tables at 100% width and NOT a fixed width, all the tables will stretch the same, right?

All in all, it was a good critique, thank-you!

Anybody else??

Sent you an email with the source to fix the table, it also removes 19 tags.

Hope those werent color tags.

K

Thank you Keegan! I've changed the index page. Can somebody check it again on high res and see if it fixed the problem before I change ALL the pages?

In my humble opinion its a very proffessional looking site and needs no changes.

Thank you very much jinxuk!

your most welcome tmay.

It is working in HI Res now (1280x1024)

It will work at 4000by9000

Change away and rock on!

You're the man Keegan! Thanks!

I'll change the rest right now.

anybody else??

Very nice indeed! Clean, fresh, professional looking - just the way I like them

The only thing I would say is that pictures look like they could be done better. At that size you should be able to get a good quality jpeg that loads very fast no problem. As they are now they look a bit naff especially the one second from left.

You've got the hi-res issue fixed and you SHOULD fix the 800x600 issue. It is SO fixable and likely, half your users will view the site at this resolution.

About the photos - had they been equal to jpg in quality, I may never have noticed. I spotted them as gifs right away. There are tools to reduce jpgs to acceptable size without visible quality loss. Ulead Smartsaver Pro is my personal choice.

Once again, very nice site!

I don't get a scroll bar at 800*600

One word...Fantastic Job! Ok that was two

Loads real quick on a 56K modem, clean, professional, everything a site should be....

I should be taking a few leafs outa your book!

THe only thing I'm going to complain about here is the logo. Is that an "A" in green there? You can barely tell. And the text for "the" and "association" looks really rough an scratchy. I think you should try moving the A to the right a little bit so it can be seen better. I also think that it should be moved further up towards the top of the page somehow.... maybe, maybe not, I'm not sure anymore.

Another complaint is that most of the site has a rather dull colour scheme - I would try to introduce more of that pale green - maybe you could do mouseovers for the icons that they become coloured in with green onmouseover.

Otherwise it looks great - I love the style you've used for the icons.

Ya nailed it Megan, the colors are too mono.

I kept looking at that logo thinking to myself (man that logo looks like something OVerphotoshoped it)

I say pimp it up a bit tmay

Put a nice pink couch there, how about one of those swings mounted to the ceiling, very 70's of ya, nice niceeeee.

=)

Thank you everybody! Still seems to be the same couple of issues, so I'll repeat part of my first response:

Quote: About the pictures: We had them as .jpgs first, but they were bigger in size and took several more seconds to load. So we made them .gifs and realized that they were smaller in size (which loaded faster) AND didn't lose any quality. We even tested them on the web and put one of each side by side and compared the quality. There was no quality loss whatsoever, so of course we went with the ones that loaded faster.

About the mouseover effects: I thought about doing something like that, but in the end we agreed not to do it. We want a website that everybody sees the same thing, not a few people with THIS browser, and maybe a few people with THAT browser type thing. So, we agreed to keep it simple and clean.

I'm not sure what else to say about the pictures. As you see them now is how we got them. We tried .jpgs first, but .gifs were the SAME quality and loaded faster. I'm not sure what to say, there's nothing to fix that I did wrong.

I appreciate all the feedback, thank-you!

About the pictures, they could be a lot better but still retain the quality & fast load time. The originals, were they actual photos or digital images?

The mouseovers would be viewed by all browsers if you used swap image/restore.

My partner is the one that got the images to use, she said they were exactly like they are now. She pulled them off of a free picture site.

We're still talking about the mouseovers. Her main concern is that our memberbase will be all professional business people that doesn't care about all the flashy stuff a page has. We have a ton of personal sites to play with. But she wants this one simple and to the point.

Well, I have to say that I disagree a little bit. Mouseovers don't make a site unprofessional in my opinion.

Also, you mentioned that you want the site to look the same from browser to browser. Yes, if you keep it simple it will be closer - but it still can look different.

There are a few things that I would like to point out:
the logo at the top is too small in my opinion.
the links don't match the logo at the top or side.
the two logos don't match - the one at the side seems really fancy and the links don't.

That's it!

Brooke :snow:

I didn't say mouseovers were unprofessional, I said our memberbase will be all professionals that don't care about that stuff. They are straight-forward business people. We just want clean and simple.

What logo at the top is too small?

The site is clean and professional looking but is rather blah.

I think you need to inject some colour into it somewhere, one place could be your icons, especially have a different color one for the page thats on. I think its the green links that give it that dull look, tryed dark grey?

the text is on the verge of being on the small side.

I also have a horz scroll on 800x600.

the five images on the index page are a little fuzzy, the second from the right is the worst to a point where I cant make out what the guy on the right is actually doing.
I notice too that its a gif, you probably know this already but never resize a gif with 256 colors or less, always increase to 24 mill colors, then resize, then decrease back to 256, 16 or whatever.

here is a free online service that crunchs .jpgs and .gifs if you need to http://www.spinwave.com/crunchers.html

looks good, keep it up

I believe that the left navbar needs an injection of colour. The pale green is nearly unreadable on my monitor against the white background. Also you might want to include all the top navbar links as text at the very bottom on the off chance that somone doesnt display images.

My 2 cents..

Lukster
:gandalf:

I just realized that somehow I missed critiquing your site and will probably repeat most of what has been said. For what my opinion is worth...here goes.

I love the simplicity of the site although I would add some color by doing the rollover thing. It would enhance it so much by bringing out just a little bit of color. The blue and white looks great looks great though. To me it is SCREAMING for some color....."please, please give me some color T". HAHA!!

The third image is just a wee bit smaller in height than the others and the black border around it is thicker at the bottom.

Also, the bottom of the page needs something. You have the title there but it is all alone. Why not do a very small logo there.

The "A" in your logo does look a little drab but it really isn't that bad to me.

As for the gifs that should be jpgs...they look to me as if they were sharpened too much if that makes sense.

Overall....I think you all have done a great job. It is really clean and straight to the point.

DM

Thank you very much everybody!

We're having a meeting about it this weekend. We'll see what we can do.

Good luck with your meeting and don't forget to continue with this thread by telling us how it went!

I know this is probably after the time - but I wanted to get back to you...

I see what you said about the mouseovers but I do agree that they need some color. Just think about it.

'the featured member spotlight', 'the sierra soho assoc' and the top nav don't match in my opinion. The first two are much more professional than the third one. I am not saying that I don't like the links - I do - they just don't seem to match the other two graphics.

That's all. I hope you had a good meeting!

Brooke :snow:

Have you had the meeting yet Troy?