Reveiw Request - www.riponcollege.co.uk

If the colors are not specific to the identity, a better color contrast would work better. It was hard to locate your navigation, and poor color contrast plays a part. Take a look at this university site to see the difference. Even here, the nav text is black. Although I would add visual separation to each button, making them more button like and signaling the user where to click.

The Ripon site could strive to provide more information with fewer clicks. Some subsection lead to yet more subsections. You can try to use pictures of the University grounds along with very short descriptions to give users a better idea of where to go.

Finally, you can add more information at the end of the navigation. There's a general information section, but then it seems the entire site is made up of nothing but general information. "Our Aims" section is lacking in specifics, or examples which give the general statement meaning. "Caring" can be a nice word, or it can mean where most universities of your type and size have a student/faculty ration of x, yours is a much lower y. This means something to surfers, where the simple generic statement has no information value. Quite frankly, were I to submit the same type of content in a freshman composition class at university I would fully expect to wash out.

Hi, thanks for that. that has really help. I have been spending all my time on our intranet.

So do you think plain text with a mouse over affect for the links are best? Example riponvirtualcollege.net . This is another site that i have done.

I will give the site a new layout. I need to so this anyway becuase i want to set style sheets on them.

Do you no if there is any scripts that can change the site text and background to black and white?

Thank again.

I agree about the colours, they are far too pastal and look totally washed out. I like the idea of the people graphics but they don't seem to be that well done and are too jagedy & blotchy to work properly as it's hard to make out at first what it is supposed to be.

Does the college not have a logo/badge/crest? What are the schools colours? This is where your design/colour scheme should come from and if they are these colours then you need to combine them with other darker colours to stop the washed out effect.

IMO the first page should have some images of the college and some basic info about the college - this is the page that should grab the attention and then lead off to other areas, not just tell someone to use the navigation.

You need to think about the navigation and access to core information. Think logically about having as many links accessable from the main nav so that people aren't clicking around to find what they want.

Apart from the header area which could look better, the rest of the page doesn't really have a design, its just light blue text (hard to read) on white and there's no designed structure to it.

Why is the adult education section different? I think that it should all have the same design, or make it completely different.

You are using css for somethings but not others. You should be using an external style sheet for all presentation elements - fonts, sizing, colours, links. This makes it much easier to change things globally and you don't get sections where text gets forgotten and is TNR by default.

On the odd instance where you have put a picture on they don't look good. An oval photo (or collagé) doesn't look right to me and just adds to the plonked on the page feel of everything, plus the feathering isn't constant and the left/right edges are cut off. I think you need more photos of the school but keep them square/rectangular.

You have a good basic site but if this is the colleges official site them I think it needs some work to make it look professional.

Thanks for the input. I dont like the site at all really. The headmaster (dont ask me why) does not want a picture of the school on the front page. The school colours are blue and yellow, which to me are good colours, but not on this website.

What color do you think i should have??????

I find to design a menu system for this site. I want one that when click on link it will drop down and can choose other. But its hard to manage. But looking at what you have said it may be best if i look in to it more.

Do you have any examples of menu system that i can look at.

The school i work for is onsite, and the software i have is not great!!!! I'm NOT allowed to work on the site at home, then again. i wouldnt really want to do that.

The banner at the top of the page is ok to me, but i seem to have a problem when on a smaller screen size it will fit, but them move to a larger school it dont fit. So i had to great the banner so it fits on a 800*600, but when it on a larger screen size it will center in the middle. Which is wasting space.

The adult education bit is not design my me. Some teacher did it. Thank good.

Thanks for the info. I have already started to make some changes to it.

Thank you

Sorry, dont understand about the Rippon.net??? I have been to this site and there is just a small picture on the left hand side.

I have change the site, since the above comments. I dont have much time at the moment. To many deadlines to keep up to on our intranet.

All i have done is updated the main index. does the menu system look ok?

what i'm wanting to do is create a folder menu system which will be on all pages and would be able to get access to all pages.

I will keep you posted on the menu!

Thanks for all the input so far.