Oppininions on new templates for my art site please!

Good work! You have a really interesting design style. Having a background in traditional art must be a big influence. It's very unique.

I definitely don't like the black on. I've never been one for black, and this one looks particularly bland. That one should definitely have a strong accent colour at least.

In most of them, the navbar needs some work. Play with your styles so those don't look so much like plain text.

On the pencil one, the curve under the logo is interrupted. The logo has a solid white backgorund instead of the curve in the bottom-right. In the black and tomatoe designs, the header text is overlapping the left navbar. By your screenshots, I see that it's supposed to do that, but it doesn't look right to me. It looks like a display problem.

Good work in getting all those designs done! I want to do something similar with my own site but at this rate I'm happy to have one design finished!

Thank you so much for the feedback Megan! I was starting to think they were so horrible, they were scaring people away.

I definately agree with you about the black template! I'm not a fan of a black background myself, but I've had so many vistitors request one that I'm trying to keep it going. I'll keep experimenting to see if I can liven it up.

Currently I have multiple templates for my site (different ones) that are different html pages brought in with ssi. I have a cgi program that switches between them. It's worked so far, but I'm VERY happy to move to totally css layouts and new looks for the templates. It will be a big improvement (I hope).

I will keep working to make the nav text nicer. I probably shouldn't be checking my site on Safari. It looks really nice in a newer browser that supports text-shadow.

Thank you for the heads up on the logo background problem. I'll see why it's not staying transparent.
The overlapping header text.... hmmm... I kinda like it myself but I can see why it might look like something's gone terribly wrong. I'll keep playing with it to see what I come up with.

Thanks so much again for the help!
I always need fresh eyes to help me spot problems.
(you should see how I gab at the art groups when I work on a new painting)

Hmmm.... I had a strange reply to this thread when I posted it to another forum yesterday.

This was part of someone's reply:

Quote: Wow, I know you said they are meant to be simple, but I was expecting simple as in clean simple, not tripod.com simple layout or geocities layout simple. I am not diggin' any of the websites, just because they are not clean. The fonts aren't clean and the designs aren't clean.

The other designs: geocities designs. I would make the sites simple, but clean and clear, not all put together as a cheap template design. I am not dissing your design, it is just that when I had thought of simple, I was expecting easy navigation with a nice simple design, but not a rip off of geocities.com templates or tripod.com templates.

All in all, I like the switching, but I don't know, if your visitors like it then what I am speaking is wind. I can tell you, I am not one of the best graphic/web designers in here, but I can at least see when one is a good site and when one isn't. As others say, one man's trash is one man's treasure...

I know the template are "simple" (tabless designs with css layout and no unnecassry graphics) but I was going more for "simple elegance" to show off my artwork not tripod template.

Can I get some oppinions please?
Do these seem like tripod or geocities templates to you?
Are the fonts and designs "not clean"? (I'm not exactly sure what that means)
Do I need to ditch these designs and start over?
I'd hate to think I don't know how to take critism, but I really didn't think they were that bad.

See... now I'm confused again.

I got your PM, Karen. That person is just being rude. They obviously don't appreciate your unique style. I think the navigation items do need some work but overall they certainly don't look like generic templates! Far from it. I'm not sure what that person means by clean either. I think sometimes people have a certain look in mind when they use that word. It's a nice look, but it's common and therefore boring. Your designs are so much more unique.

In particular, the text on the upper right side is conflicting. There are three rows of text there in most of the designs and they sort of conflict with one another. Try reducing the use of full caps. maybe leave the main navigation in caps and do the rest of the text in regular case. Keep the breadcrumbs and the top navigation row smaller. Also avoid centering text. It makes things more difficult to read and creates an amateurish look. Centering text tends to work a little better in print, and it takes care to make it look right.

In general I think you should rethink the way the navigation is set up. Maybe try a tabbed interface or something for the four main sections. I was confused about which navbar was the main one. It took some navigating to realize that the left side is secondary navigation. If the main navigation had a more decorated interface it might stand out more and become obvious. I also find som eof th eterms to be somewhat ambiguous ("Acquire", "layouts" etc.)

I'll bump your thread over to critiques so you can get some more feedback.

Thank you sooooo much Megan!

I won't say that comment made me cry, but I did get pretty upset that someone would think that they looked like generic, cheap templates.

From her posts (and site) I noticed though that she loves a photoshop picture that's been sliced and used for a frame around the content.
(Don't jump me for saying that... I've seen that done really well and I used to do all my designs that way. In fact the "eyes" template has been one of my most popular ones, so I'm still using it for the new designs.)
When she kept suggesting I turn all my link text into gifs, I realized we simply have very different views about designing an art site.
(usually that can be a good and productive thing but this time it didn't seem to be helpful to me)

I know that there are tons of things that can be done to make these templates better. I'm going to continue working on the text and will try a "tabbed" type part for my main links. Thank you!

Hmmm.... so is a "dirty" page one where there are lines and squiggles everywhere that don't really make sence and a "clean" design is acres of whitespace with hardly anything on the page?
Oh well... guess that teaches me to cheat on you guys with another forum.

Thanks again for the compliments, advice and help Megan!
And thanks for moving this thread for me.

For what it's worth Karen, I think your work is outstanding. This person obviously has no freakin' clue about design or art. There is nothing about your templates that say cheap at all.

(And even better you have the first switcher I've seen that works in Opera!)

Thank you so much Roo!
Your opinion is worth my weight in gold (which is quite a lot )

I've seen your work and I am very impressed by your website and fabulous artworks!

I think I'm just going to have to accept the fact that to some my designs are outdated, old school and cheap looking.

I'm going to keep working on different ways to do my top links. I so appreciate the comments and advice!

Thank you again!

You're right Megan... you just can't please some people and you've got to know when to move on. I just get paranoid when someone says my work sucks. I always wonder if they hate it that much there must be something wrong with it.

I guess I'm the type that loves a good critique but isn't very good at taking criticism. Guess I won't be selling her one of my websites anytime soon.

Thank you both again Megan and Roo! I'm feeling much better about this now. I'm anxious to play with the design again and see what I can do with those links.

You people are the best!

>>>NO! Don't! Your artistic style is what makes you unique.<<<

Megan said it all in that one sentance!

People can pull 'Cookie Cutter' sites out of thier butts all they want but something unique and artistic is a whole lot of work and well.....that's the way it should be!

I think I know what that person was referring to by 'not clean,' however they couched their reply in unfriendly terms and they don't fully understand the root of the issue. The difference for you is that you're using a mac, on which the OS beautifully anti-aliases text. That post-writer and myself are both using Windows (I would expect), which doesn't. Ergo the source of the problem is not you or your ability, it's the graphically retarded OS! Jeffrey Zeldman was talking about this a while ago ( http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0404h.shtml#print2 ):

Quote:
Every time I design a website in Photoshop, I leave the body text non-antialiased, because ugly, pixellated text is what most computer users will see. I wish they could see what I see when I use OS X. Even Amazon looks pretty because of the Mac’s superior text handling. If I had Bill Gates’s money, I would buy a Mac for every person who needs a computer.
-Jeffrey Zeldman

Damnit, I want to go and get a screen-shot to show you what I mean, but the links just take me to an advert!

So the problem is using plain text for primarily decorative elements, or elements that provide function but also need to look appealing. You could - and I know you'll do this sparingly, you're someone who knows what they're doing (and that's not a compliment I offer very often!) - use image replacement, Fahrners' method has been superceded, but there are plenty of more compliant techniques which will degrade nicely when encountered by unusual viewports. This will allow you to replace some of the plain text with images, without compromising the useability of the site.

The other option is to take the emphasis away from the text of the element by building something decorative around it, Megans tab idea is a good one.

But! Do not compromise the way the site looks at the moment by making it more generic, I recently read a book called "Purple Cow" (link to book on Amazon) which explains exactly why you'll be successful and the writer of that post will fail. By being remarkable you're opening yourself to criticism, but mainly from people who don't know how to create a service in this saturated market, people who are bound to fail. If they're going to fail why listen to them? Ignore them!

Don't worry, the designs are great, the switcher works, you use tables to display data in a tabular format - not for design. In my opinion you're worth ten of that critic, who - I expect - knows little or nothing of standards or truly artistic, remarkable web design.

Anything I can do to help, e.g. Windows screen shots, just drop me a PM or write in this post.

Hope this helps!

Thank you sooooo much JeevesBond!
I had no idea Windows did such a messed up job with text. I may have to rework another redesign I'm doing for someone else.

I have just been so excited to finally be able to seperate all the content from the design elements and cut out unnecessary things like tables and images where ever I can. Here I was worried that the css would degrade nicely in older browsers... when nearly 45% of my visitors (according to my logs) will be seeing choppy, messy text.
Hmmm.... guess it's not enough to worry about putting in hacks so layers and divisions look right in IE, now we have to contend with windows making a mess of our text.
Bill's got a lot of 'splainin' to do!

Thank you so much for letting me know about the text differences! And thank you also for the compliment, it means a lot to me! I would love to think I'm a "Purple Cow". That's what I'm aiming for.
Ok... this is another challenge, but I like challenges... I may not get the updates done as soon as I'd hoped, but luckily I have a great group of experts to turn to so it will be right.

To be fair, the implementations excellent, nicley coded & useful. If all sites had this function, it would make them more interesting! When people can personlize a site to their taste it makes them feel welcome and more willing to spend time their.

Thanks so much mfdc! I've found (at least with my visitors) the more I let them play at my site, the more they like it. I used to have jigsaw puzzles, email cards and printable art calendars. I think I'm going to put the calendars and cards back on the site but I'd have to find a replacement for the java applet puzzles. (I don't like applets myself)

I've also decided to go ahead and make home pages that have more of a splash page feel (even though they have the same info on them). I've got them mostly done now. I'd apreciate your oppinions on them!

I'm also going to try the image replacement that JeevesBond so wisely suggested. I still want to keep the images to a minimum so if anyone can tell me... Is there a max size where text still looks good on a windows machine? I am using arial, verdana, helvetica, sans-serif for my font family and am just using the sizes small, medium, large, x-large and h2, h3 in my pages. Can I get away with only replacing the larger main links (About, Galleries, Aquire, Freebies) or is there other text that should be replaced? I also thought I'd use the background image with a hidden span technique. Is there a better method which creates a more accessible page?

Thank you all again so much for your comments, compliments and help!

Ok I'm trying something different to see if it helps clean up the text.
I'm using Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif for the font family on all the regular text and Georgia, Garamond, serif on headlines and the top nav.
Does that make the text look any cleaner on windows?

(Well it probably doesn't hurt to give it a little variety anyway. )

Thanks again everyone for the help!

I am no art student (barely passed appreciation in college ... lol) but I must say the following:

WOW! ... I am so impressed with the entire site ... the layout for the changer is awesome ... the "eyes" template is so cool ... I found myself dreaming up sites that would fit it after only 30 seconds ... There is a simple elegance I found quite nice ... Even the Black layout would fit certain themed sites quite nicely ...

The only problem I had was when I went to your index page ... I found that some of the backgrounds seemed to get chopped off ... were they meant to do that or do I just need a bigger monitor

otherwise I really enjoyed surfing your site ... keep up the great stuff!

Go Karen...go Karen

Don't be put off by that Know-it-all.

Loads of people will/do love your site (inc. me)

btw on the black layout the rollover on the links on the left are a bit weird. Oh, and by the way I literally jumped out of my seat when I saw http://karencardinal.com/Website/test.php. It just looked so good!! I literally jumped with joy! Great site, Great artwork! What more could a young girl like you want?
(well, i suppose a hunk like me would be nice )

I like this site very much -- I am on WinXP, Mozilla.

Just for you, I opened IE (whatever is the current version) --

In the Eyes layout, Mozilla looks great, but IE leaves a huge white space at the top of the page -- I see only the first row of pictures without scrolling down.

I'm short of time this morning, but will come back!

Ooops, should have said -- Galleries page.

Well, the arrows move erratically (just like my heart when I read your gorgeous posts) when I move over the different links. I think a css changer is just what an art site needs.

Yeah, so what happens with me is that the arrows decide to do some Mexican dance or something like that- the arrows jump on/off from one link to the other. Nice display to watch, but I don't think it's meant to be there, somehow!

AttaGirl! TM Keep going! At the end of it you'll have on good ite!

I think this looks great, it looks very professional and gives you defined recognition as an artist.