REVIEW REQUEST: B & D Litho, Inc.

Welcome to TWF Kyle,

Firstly we do ask that you help out others here by reviewing some of their sites before getting a critique on your own, so if you'd be so good as to help on that side.

I get a huge horizontal scrollbar at 800*600. The first thing I notice is that it looks like there is nothing on the first page, accidentally found that by mousing over the round pictures it brings up a huge picture in the middle. I'm on cable but wondered how long it takes to open on a modem connection with all those large pictures? IMO the first page really offers no explaination of what the company does and you really need some text on there (for search engines as well). It's also very bland looking, I know you said you haven't decided on the logo but IMO you could use some colour in there. The general layout is nice and with some tweeking will be good.

it takes a very long time to load on 56k. over 700kb WOW
one thing i have noticed is you have used the status bar for link description, you'll find many people expect to see that, i for one wont go surfing if i cant see where i am going. good thing it doesnt work in Opera .
I get a big scroll bar as well in IE5, NS4.7 and Opera6
Ok i dont have flash6, personaly i dislike flash and since hackers have discovered how to use flash for hacking i wont update it.
ok i tried a link, the about us, thats another 500 and something kb.
its probably flash as well, so sorry i cant review your site unless you offer an html version.

The flash loaded relatively quickly on 56k.
I must be having a good modem day.

The horizantal scrollbar is really bad on 800x600.

The About Us page doesn't seem to have any content at all in it.

I'm pretty neutral on the colors and design. Quite conventional.

The black "and" in the top-right corner is almost invisible since my monitor is set to low contrast.

The nav rollover text that appears in the statusbar isn't cleared upon moving the mouse outside the nav. This could give the wrong impression of the current page.

I agree that the buttons in flash movie aren't effective. Make it more obvious by showing some text beside it. The homepage also appears empty with nothing in the content area.

Overall, it makes a good second draft. I think you need to add something visually unique to your site.

My first impression is that this looks pretty good. Kind of serene with the muted colour scheme. I like it. You've done a good job of creating a look and feel here.

What I don't like about this is the big drop shadows on the logo text and the other part towards the right side. Shrink those down - a lot (or get rid of them altogether)

Ooh! I like the curved effect you've used on the other pages. Very cool. I'm wondering why I don't see that on the front page... grr... will have to check in IE to see what I'm missing. (Flash isn't coming up in Opera 6 for some reason...I do have plug-ins enabled so it's not that.) I really think that the big flash piece here is unnecessary. Those pictures aren't all that nice and you could have done something to serve the same purpose without a plug in or the huge file size.

I am also getting a small scrollbar at 1024 with windows taskbar on the right (I don't know how common of a layout this is, although I've never seen anyone else use it so maybe it's not a problem)

Not bad looking but I don't think the flash is a good idea for the home page. Not for the entire body part anyway. I am on a dial-up and have to admit, had I come across your site while looking for your product or surfing, I would have been long gone before it loaded. BTW, took about 3 minutes for me to load the page. (after it asked did i want to install and run flash 6). You forced me to upgrade.

I agree that your dropshadows on the top graphics are too big. Also think that you could really liven up the site by making your title a bright color instead of the dark marbled look. It looks a little out-dated IMO.

Got to do something about the horizontal scroll. I like how you have that curve effect though. Do you think you could fix it so that the whole page is visible at 800X600 and still keep your curve?

Your text is a little small *not bad though* but it looks overpowered by that large graphic at the top. I think that making the title graphic smaller or the text in the body larger would help get things in porportion.

On NS 4.79, the background for the main body is tiling on the contact and request page. There is also an issue with the cells that the menu is in. They seem to be breaking up on these pages.

And on the upload file and request quote page, the form background is extending all the way to the right side of the page.

Oh, welcome to TWF!! Glad to have you.

Thanks for the reviews! Sorry I didn't know you were supposed to review other sites first. I'll do that later today since I'm a board-addict. I'll resolve some issues and fix some things you all mentioned.

800x600 - Yes I know there is a horizontal scrollbar, I'm using fixed pixel width; the site is made for 1024x768

About the Flash...Yes, it sucks. I may get rid of it if I can find a way to use layers or something to do the same effect, I COULD compress the movie, the JPEG quality is set to 95 so those images actually retain their value and quality. I also didn't realize it was 700KB :eek:

The About Us page is unfinished, I'm still waiting for the client to fill that part out

Thanks for the headsup about the low contrast issue, I use a laptop so it's really hard for me to judge what a color looks like and the monitors we use at work aren't any better.

Thanks for the tip about the shadows Megan. Consider that done when I get on it at work.

I'm still debating on whether or not I should resize this site for 800x600...I'm swaying towards a possible yes but I don't feel like re-doing the site again.

Perhaps I could make a header and footer, 800x600 and 1024x768 version and just make the text areas the body, that would solve issues except when it comes to the Flash part

Disaster-master: What do you mean the background is extending all the way to the right?

Thanks again guys, big help here. I'll get working on this and tell ya when I have another draft up. Thanks again,

Kyle

What you could do is just use a simple Javascript targeted rollover script instead of any fancy Flash or dHTML. It would serve exactly the same purpose and wouldn't cause any problems with browsers or plugins.

Here is a screenshot for you. The light blue background in the body part is what I was talking about. Not sure if it is the forms causing it but it only does that on pages with forms. (only in NS 4.7)

You can also see the that the background is tiling as well as the part under the menu isn't doing something right.

That should be an easy one to correct.

Hmmm...does NS4 support the overflow feature? The only reason I can think that this is happening is because all the forms pages use a stylesheet which, unfortunately, Netscape doesn't take the wonderful opportunity to make use of, so it's defaulting them to the originals sizes thus making the page go past it's fixed width/height and not getting the overflow:auto; command that it needs to be getting since I don't think it supports it. Stupid Netscape :sigh:

For reference, this is what it should look like, with a decent browser:

http://www.bndlitho.com/temp/bndlitho.jpg

according to this document,

Quote: Overflow is handled correctly only by Netscape 6. Explorer expands the parent object when overflow is set to visible. Netscape 4 always expands the parent object, regardless of the overflow setting.

might be some help on this page