REVIEW REQUEST: conxiondesigns.com

The first thing that stands out to me is that this would be much better without the black background. It seems really out of place next to the pale blue colours of the rest of the site. It ruins the nice light feeling you've created elsewhere.

I guess you all know how I feel about the shades of blue look so I won't comment too much on that. You all probably also know how I feel about placing irrelevant site updates on the front page.

Mouseovers don't seem to be working right in my browser - weird things happening (Opera 7 beta).

My eyes for some reason are drawn to the left side menu, which doesn't seem to be the most important part of the navigation. There seems to be a bit of an odd mix of stuff on there that isn't really the focus of the site. Definitely lose the "chill out" bit - rather inappropriate for a business site. I don't like the way that menu is formatted either.

Overall, I think you need to place more emphasis on what you can do for the client. The section under the "services" heading seems to be the most important content here, and yet it is placed towards the bottom of the page - an unimportant location. My eye is drawn towards the left side menu and the empty space beside that middle graphic, not towards the important stuff.

Edit: Speaking of that center graphic - I like how you've used those silhouettes there - it might be a good idea to use those in the logo area rather than the rather generic graphics you've got now.

I totally agree with Megan, things just don't seem to flow right. A white background would give it a fresh, crisp look and another colour would help balance the blues, maybe some orange.

I prefer the left hand side navigation to be left aligned rather than centred. What is that bit under the left navigation?? Look rather odd to me!

The only other thing to add is that I think the centre graphic looks out of place for a start and that really should be the logo at the top but obviously smaller, but I'm not overly keen on the font used for the 'Conxion Designs' part as it just doesn't look professional and appears rather weak.

Overall layout is fine just need some content placement changes and some tweeking here & there

Viewing on 1280x1024, the side nav seems pretty disproportioned. % width is ok, but the fonts still remain very tiny. I recommend using a fixed-width nav.

Same could be said of the top nav (spans too wide across the screen).

Also the gradient image at the end of the nav is resampled weirdly with resizes — gets the jaggies. Probably not a good idea to use % widths for images like that.

It's good that you've gone for a liquid design, but sometimes it's better to leave some elements fixed-size.

I basically agree with everything that has been said here. In addition, I noticed a small gap in right side of all the menu items in the left menubar and also the last menu item in the top menubar.

As with me I also agree with everything that has been said.

For your naviagation, you have a mouseover that has a blue background it looks a bit odd, and the nav is split into two columns and on the bottom column you have home >> again I odn't think it should be there since you already have a link to home.

and the black background looks very out of place

At the bottom you have another navigation bar that links only to home, what about making links to the links up the top too?

Ok wow thanks everyone. This is really helpful. I never really post work to be reviewed so I am afraid to say that I might not be the quickest to go back and change it.

Ok the thing is that I am going to keep the liquid design. I might have to give up some design points but thats ok. I wanted to change the left side nav to a fixed width one but the problem is that the left hand div (where content is) is a percentage. Therefore putting one to fixed width and one to percentage causes major problems. Anyways I will keep working to get that fixed. I see what you mean.

I have done a few things.
1) Changed the "Chill out" on the left side nav and added some more side nav blocks to fill it in.
2) Took out black background and extended page to 100% so that there is not a huge empty space around it.
3) Got ride of top nav. Now that I think about it, its not worth the trouble and is getting to be common that I don't think I really want to use it.

Still to do:
1) Change the top graphic to be more like the "Welcome" logo.
2) Add in any additional color.
3) Find out how to do fixed width nav.
4) Try and get ride of 1px white line under top logo.
5) Focus on design and drawing the users eyes to the main content on the page and less to the left nav bar (unimportant).
6) Fix the terrible image under the left nav bar.
7) Test in Opera 7b and at higher res monitors.

Wow ok guys thanks.
I would really like to know which browsers/os/resolutions the people who had problems were using?
-dk

Wow, what an improvement! Good job.

You might want to add "remove the rounded top-left corner" to your todo list Also, I'm sure one of our great webmasters here can help you with the fixed with navbar.

Now, let's do the banana dance

Haha thanks for the good laugh Zollet. lol. I will post that fixed nav question in another forum because I know it does not belong here but as for adding orange to the color sceme. Would people say that it is a neccesity or is the site not bad with all blue?

Also if anyone has a solution for dynamically increasing text size then could they post it here? Someone said that the text on the side bar should expand to fit the space.

Last thing, I think Megan voiced her opinion about not wanting to have news on the main page of the website. Where do most people put news? or do they leave announcements completely off their website.
Thanks again.
-dk

#nav {
width:100px;
}
#content {
margin-left:100px;
}

That's how I did it on my site and it works like a charm

And as for the news what about putting it in a section named 'news'?

I would do it that way but it doesnt display correctly in IE5 if you use that because of a problem with the box model. If 20% of traffic wasn't using it then I could care less but I have to take that into consideration. Thanks anyways.
-dk

change your DOC tag to XHTML trans and retry what you're doing.
your code is a mix of html and xhtml, so you'll need to fix the html bits to make it validate.

Don't look Suzanne
use tables
but seriously tables are still good to use on layouts (still can be valid strict and 1.1 as layout). Just try not to nest them to deep (3 max).
Tables werent made for layouts from day one but have been used for them for years so there is no point in stopping now. tables are valid part of html and xhtml but the w3c "recomend" to use as they were made for, for data.
CSS doesn't have enough support for a lot of minor things yet, let alone the major stuff so there is no point in throwing away what already works. Sure when CSS does become more stable and universal switch over. until then you'll find you're making more work for yourself trying to get it to look universal way worse than just IE vs NS, now you have to do those two, plus others, plus all the versions.
You seriously think forums etc will switch to tabless designs?? maybe one day (and they aren't classed as data tables) but most forums and blogs etc already comply to XHTML standards.

I'm not meaning this to turn into a debate (if you wish to, reopen, or start a new thread do it in the proper forum topic) just that XHTML has been out for 3 years, CSS even longer. It's everyone is wanting to advance but your doing yourself a disservice by dumping what works. Am I against the changes? no, I want to advance to one day when I can make a layout which would work in all browsers and its layout effected by the DOC tag I choose, but it's not avaible yet.

my 2cents

I think the design is cool but I don't like the logo "Welcome to Conixon Designs". It seem to just be a repeat of the logo in the top left hand corner. Mabye make something that is a little differen't.

Also mabye use more space in the dark blue horizontal strip at the top. You could use this for some menu links.

Good luck with your site, it looks pretty good!

Andrew Drake

While the site is clean and well laid-out I feel it is lacking any punch at all. In a marketplace driven by the need to impress you're not doing yourself any favours in a conservative design. That said, the fact that your design is clean is a very good start.

Don't think I've got much to add to everything that has been said already...Apart from observing the likeness to the original PHP site (http://www.php.net )
Hmmm...