REVIEW REQUEST: Eye on Worcestershire

It all seems to work ok but it is a tad boring and does it have to be blue? Maybe you could have some images of Worcestershire on there to brighten it up. It's all well and good having a compliant site but that doesn't mean it has to be boring does it?

I agree. It would be nice to see a different colour used here, or the addition of a bright complementary colour to add some spice. The orange on mouseover is nice - why not find another use for that colour?

I really like what you've done with that logo - great example of an eye-catching text-based logo. It would be nice to see a picture of some sort on the front page here, just to liven things up. Maybe a photo of a recent event or something.

Are you planning on adding more information here for tourists at all? Or people new to the area? I'm looking at this page and wondering where exactly Worchestershire is and (hypothetically), where I could stay, what there is to do in the area etc. You could create a reciprocal links network with other sites about the area, providing a good overall resource for visitors as well as locals.

Can't beleive I didn't notice this until now - teeny fonts! Hard to read that! PLEASE keep your font size close to the default - people can make it smaller if they like it that way. I'm not finding it to be too bad here but it all could stand to be a little bit bigger. The terms & conditions and copyright links at the bottom are too pale to read as well. They should be a little more visible.

Overall a very nice looking site!

P.S. You know the page is "untitled", right?

errr... yeah i know theres no title at the mo. Its just a template at the moment. just playing with ideas like.

I had definatly planned on adding some sort of picture on the homepage, i might have a big montage thingy behind the logo and banner. that could look cool.

The site was really going to be aimed at locals, but after your post its occured to me that people from all over the world could be planning on coming here (god only knows why tho...) . A few articles about the area and location would definatly be worth while. Good thinking batman

Personally I like the fonts at that size. They look perfectly legible on my 17" monitor running 1152x864. I had planned on some accessablity options (like a text only version and a high contrast version) by switching the stylesheet. Just out of interest what monitor size and resolution do you use?

By the way... its worcestershire, pronounced wor-cess-ter-shire

& there is a cooking sauce named after it!

I'm on a 17" at 1152 as well. I find the font size here at TWF to be quite comfortable (although it could stand to be a tad bit bigger too). When you're looking at a monitor for 7+ hours a day things start to get hard on the eyes. In general I think it's a problem when people deviate from the default size by too much. If people want to see fonts smaller they'll set their browsers accordingly - leave it up to the user.

You also have to remember that some of your visitors may not have vision as good as yours. Ever notice how pretty much everyone over the age of 50 seems to have reading glasses? What happens when they visit your site? At least use flexible font sizes so the user can use their browser to make them bigger if they want to. (Nevermind that a lot of people probably don't know that they can change the font size! Could be losing visitors there.)

In this case it's not a huge problem since you've only got a small amount of text at that size, but when you get into longer articles it will be more of an issue.

In an ideal world, IMO, the font size on every site was more or less the same with the ability to scale according to user preferences. You'll see sites with font sizes varying from what you've got to this one (a page I happened to be looking at... working on an Anthropology course). Can you imagine having to change your font size adjustment for every site you visited? Call it an accessability issue, and considering the number of people who may be affected by it, a pretty important one at that.

I will bear that in mind and see how it looks with larger font sizes.

hello again... I've taken your comments into consideration and improved the existing design.

it now has... graphics, better use of colour, and slightly bigger fonts which are scaleable, not fixed pixel sizes - well, apart from the headerbar anyway, which goes mad if you enlarge it!.

so... whatcha all think?

I like the header area but the main body still seems to be lacking something - maybe it's because there is nothing in the right hand column, what going there? It looks slightly better at higher resolutions because you see some of the map which brings the page to life a bit more but at 800*600 it's below the fold and so you don't see it until you scroll down.

As for the place name links, I think they should be separated with a : or | to make them more readable.

Look great! I was just going to say what Julia said about separating the items on the navbar. Once you get a photo in there of a local event it'll look even better. I would also consider puting an underline on hover for those left navbar links - you could get a lot of newbies to a site like this who may not fully understand what's happening there.

Top navbar font's a little, whether scaled or not. Redditch is spilling over onto the shadow.