Review: DesignAlpha.com

Off to a pretty good start.

Your nav: Seperate the different pages/links with something, maybe a pipe, | or similar. Instead of using images to create that rollover effect, it can also be achieved with CSS.

The hosting packages could also be speard out horizontally across the page rather than have it vertical.

Apart from too much white space, you have a good simple site

I get a horizontal scrollbar at 800*600, this is because you have your table set to 800 pixels and the maximum you can have is around 720 or 770 if you have 0 margins.

I would personally have an external style sheet for the css as it's much easier then to make global changes.

I quite like the top part but find that everything is too far squashed to the left, especially the navigation. To me the rest looks a bit disjointed, the 'Hosting Packages' grey bar just seems to float and looks out of place with the rest of the main section. The boxes on the right don't look right as the black border isn't on all sides.

You have a good start but I think you need to work on making all aspects of the page gel together much more.

I thik that the logo thing is too squashed to the top - that's the first thing I notice. Put a little space around that. While you're at it, do something more interesting with the lettering (like using contrasting font faces), and change the lower case letters to they don't blend in with the background quite so much. There's too much weight on the capitals there.

In the body of the page, you need to do more to make sure those boxed elements relate to each other more. They all seem randomly placed there. Do the headers and borders in the same style for each, and make sure the widths are either exactly the same or very different. The ones on the left for design packages should match the hosting ones on the left to a certain extent

Something seems to be wrong with your navbar here. Are there supposed to be two grey bars there? One with vertical lines every 50 pixels or so? The navbar graphics also need a little more space in between them. The words are all running together.

NOw that I'm on the "design" page, you really need to add some margins to your text here. It shouldn't bump into the borders like that. I also don't understand why you have "in development" in here - the text seems complete enough to me. The user doesn't need to know right now that you're planning to add more there.

Watch your grammar - "You know what your getting" - should be you're or you are.

Web hosting page - this needs work. Make the colour scheme match the rest of the site. And again, put some padding around the text in there.

Software page - design is very different from others with the big graphic on the left. Text needs a lot of work - doesn't make much sense and doesn't tell you up front what this Aurora software is supposed to do.

Advertising, Portfolio, and Support links don't seem to work.

Overall not a bad job but needs some tweaking in a lot of areas.

Thanks all, I will get working on these tweaks!

The nav bar is supposed to be spaced by | bars that look inset, as Megan saw, but I assume she is using NS or Mozilla because it only gets split like the is NS 7.1 for me...I have to work on cross browser compatibility.

Main page was something I just couldn't get right, I tried 15 different things, and I had to settle on something because I would have been siteless for months on end, making chances at revenue potential impossible.

If you view the source and you see the CSS code, it actually IS an external file, I used PHP to call it. This resolves a NS issue that i never investigated to see if it was fixed.

As for the images with the black border and the grey box for the hosting packages, I gave the table cellpadding and it pulled it from the navigation and the black border, it flowed better without the border. I will have to use a div or span to get spacing where I need it. Or I could be more DOM and CSS complian and just use CSS.

Thanks for all the grammer mistakes, that is my #1 flaw. I have the common problem of fixing things as I read, never picking up the problems. I normally have to give my professional writing to 3-4 people to find all the errors.

First of all, I want to say that sometimes white space is good. Much better than being all jumbled and squashed up.

When I look at the overall layout of the front page, it seems that everything at the top is bunched up on the left and then your main body content (images) are bunched up on the right. No balance.

Instead of having "company news" on the front page why don't you give a nice introduction to your business? In general, people don't care that you have decided to go with a conservative and professional design. In fact, this could turn away clients, IMO. Future design plans for the site, what you have left out and whether you are behind schedule or not isn't something that really needs to be on this site. When people come to your site, they are looking for something -- services, products, etc. Tell them what you do, what you have and why the need to hang around and use your services.

Also, in the main body part, instead of having a Linux hosting image that says, includes MySQL, php, mail scanner, etc. use plain text. This will reduce load time as well as help with the search engines.

Nice start.

Well I have taken some advise and designed this new concept.

Please ttell me if you like it (not 100% finished), if it is professional, and if you could rank it bewteen 1 and 10 on improvement over the exisit design.

http://www.designalpha.com (existing design)
http://www.designalpha.com/sample_da.jpg (the new design)

I'd say this is about a 5 in terms of improvement. You still need some refinement on this though. What are those three pictures on the left side of the header graphic? They look kinda like computer equipment of some sort. I don't think the target audience would identify with that (could be wrong about that though.)

Move your logo text down a little more into the middle of that graphic (while staying to the left side). One of the problems with your old design is that there wasn't enough space around elements - this is the same problem. If you look at a lot of the big name sites (like IBM, Microsoft etc.) you'll notice that their logos are quite small but surrounded by a lot of empty space. This helps the logo to stand out and become memorable to your visitors.

The navbar looks good but I'm not sure about those little blue and orange spaces in between. Maybe get rid of those. The section below that looks good but I'm not sure about the darker cutout around it. Same with the grey section underneath that. The cutouts are oddly shaped and although I see the rationale behind them I don't think they are necessary. The bottom section with Company News etc. looks good, although you might want to try to use that orange more in other areas. It's very strong, and attracts the eye to an area of the page that isn't all that important.

Overall a strong improvment over the previous version, it just needs some refinement.

- make smaller font size for the text in the page footer

- do not use that italic text. just make that paragraph look normal

- align those hosting packages images to the left