need2know design

bump (thread just released)

thanks babes

no takers on giving me a review?

the site looks great. looks like you made full use of your space, not too many empty spaces. nice colors, layout, professional look. although i dont like generated tooltips, they still look good. only problem i see is the articles link takes me to a temporary error page. i would move the FAQ link to the top of the page where it is more likely to be seen.

All looks good to me, nice use of colours, easy to navigate, although I'd query the use of the pictures in the top right instead of text. Not too clear what is there until you rollover with the mouse.

Otherwise great looking site

yeah i don't have enough space for all the tabs. i need to work on the icons. They were just quick knockups until i have tim ti get some proper ones done. Will be implmenting the css popups on them i think,.

Looks like you've put some effort into this, so I'll try to be detailed. I don't much like the design, actually; I think you've overdone some good things while under-developing others. Still, you have a sound base to work from as it's basically quite a clean theme, not falling for any amateurish traps.

Good palette, has a nice and positive feel. I don't think the washed out squares in the top-right corner or the pencil in the bottom-left contribute anything though. In fact they distract the eye, making the page very noisy. Just get rid of them, and think about other ways to make use of the unoccupied space.

Same goes for the lines bordering paragraphs. They're very out of place -- you could easily do without them. And putting them on the left adds weight to left of the page, making the general layout unbalanced. Also, they steal focus from the already diminutive text.

Make the text more prominent and readable. Don't be afraid to kick up the font size a bit. Play with typographic and text layout techniques to add weight to the copy, rather than simply decorating it with box lines. The Google ad, for instance, attracts all attention in the plain body (it has headings, interesting two-column shape, etc).

Along the same lines, you might shift the welcome message to below your intro graphic. I think the text flow would be easier to follow that way.

I like the "design articles" and "script library" images. That's reasonable usage of de-saturated colours.

I like everything in the left column, except for the tooltips. They don't seem to serve any purpose. If you write good 'microcontent' for the leading blurbs in Latest News and Articles, you won't have to expand them with tooltips and whatnot. Keep it simple.

The navigation tab bar at the top looks neat. But I can't easily click on them to navigate. I have to aim for the tiny label text/image in each tab to make the link function. This is despite the fact that the tab becomes highlighted when I mouseover any part of it. Make the whole thing clickable.

There are some alignment issues with all the little bits and pieces on the page, that you may want to make consistent. You could make the left column boxes line up vertically with the left margin of the first tab in the tab bar, and the logo. You could horizontally line up the top of Search box and the content in the main section. They're only minor adjustments, but will subtly add to the overall cohesiveness of the design.

As I said, you have a good solid base, but it's just not coming together because of a lot of little things. Hope that helps.

wow, nice description about your website. is good that some one is poiting this up.

I have made a few of the requested changes: a new flash header is currently in the making. Some alignment issues in ff and w3c browsers have been resolved, the tab system has been fixed, the green paragraph lines removed (Finally lol). Just got to work on laying out the content now.

Does anyone else have any input?