REVIEW REQUEST: pixelfreak.com

Welcome to TWF. Be sure and critique some of the other sites while you are here. Everyone loves to get opinions of others.

It is different from most sites that I have seen posted here. Original-unique. I was checking out your animations and on 16color5.html when you click to play the animations it doesn't show the correct ones.

You definatley have talent and seem to be doing well. I read the article about you at austin chronicle. Congrats!! Love the house animation. That must have taken a while to do.

About you little navigation box or your SON as you call it;) That isn't something that I would suggest using on just any web site but I guess since you are showing off your works then it is ok. The only other thing that I would maybe consider is having more text content toward the top of your home page.

Good job with your animations....you'll go far.

I think that what you really need to work on here is your navigation. I don't see a navbar of any sort here, which is the first problem. Oh, okay, that disc thing is for navigation. That needs to be much more clearly labelled - I did not think that would be for nav, first of all, and once I did figure it out I couldn't decipher your iconology very easily. Oh, okay, when you mouseover it the explanation comes up. Neat ideas, but not very user-friendly. I would either make some changes to that or provide another option.

I also feel that the site lacks flow - not only because of the navigation problems but also because the design isn't very consistent from page to page. It's okay to vary the design a little bit, but some pages are drastically different from others and the logo doesn't appear on all of them either. Too much scrolling is also a problem on most of the pages.

Otherwise the design style is very nice, very different. I like the style you've chosen - what you should do is develop it further, do something interesting with it on every page, make it really stand out.

The site is best viewed with Internet Explorer 6 or higher and resolution 600x800 or higher.

I checked it on NS4.7, apart from the words under your navigation (which I cant make out in IE) dont align and I see 2 houses sideby side instead of one, would be very easy to fix for ver4 browsers, seems the reason i see two is you have your table cell width set at 689%" .. >
oh and works fine on IE5 as well

liked the way the house building was done, maybe a turn music off option? and a loading percentage or something, had no idea how big it was, nearly wasnt going to stick around to see it.

turn music off... you mean it has music?!
I put music to it once and decided to take it off, I thought I did... and about the loading percentage... well I don't yet know how to do that, is it simple?
I hope to fix the problems you've mentioned, though the scrolling thing I think it only happens in the about section, I figure it's easy to just press the down key and keep reading
and about the different styles, yeah, I know there's no order... what can I say :-/
Well it's like disaster-master says, I'm only trying to show off what I can design

Interesting stuff...

I would suggest making the text one size larger. Really difficult for me to read with my default browser settings.

And, at least for color-impaired me, I wish Microsoft had never thought of allowing a web designer to change the colors of the vertical scroll bar. To my eyes, the colors look the opposite of my defaults (I know they're not exactly the same colors, but the net effect for me is scrolling working the scroll bar is confusing.)

I'd suggest some consistent text/nav at or near the top of each page, and perhaps some text somewhere that explains better how to navigate and what stuff is/does - for example at
http://www.pixelfreak.com/works/16color3.html
I don't understand what the bar that has
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
is supposed to do. Maybe it's changing page contents, but if so, it's changing everything that's below the scroll, so it's not apparent what's going on. I think you could re-arrange things so more of the 'important' stuff is above the scroll....

Aloha!
Richard

I'll try to make it user-friendlier... I guess it's different because it's personal, it could be more ordinary (navigation bar) but that's exactly what I didn't want

Nice site. Different. Good work, specialy the house.

What can I say.. you have talent! I wouldn't really worry about the earlier comments re: navigation. For people who sit on forums all day your site may be cause some getting used to. I had no problem finding my way around, very impressive work, keep it up!

cool, thanks, I feel better, heh
especialy when you (shotaker) say the navigation's ok, I did worry a bit about it

I think that the thing you have to think about here is that, as you said in another forum, you are looking to get some freelance work. I think that you should try to present yourself in a little more of a professional manner, and make it as easy as possible for potential clients to get around the site. You don't need to get rid of that disk menu, but do provide a simpler alternative.

what I've thought is that maybe I can make "fake" layouts for web pages and post them in a section of my site, that way I can show employers the kind of thing I can do

oh and by the way, it's a cube not a disk!

Oh, okay, it looks kind of like a floppy disk to me, or a zip disk or something like that...

you're not the first one to see it like that, I really got to make it spin so it shows it's dimensions

It's really good and professional. Thank goodness you didn't use times for your font, and everything fits smoothly for once. It looks awesome. I also wouldn't worry about the navigation. it is really cool. It shows what you can do. But it is a bit obscure, hard to find out it is navigation. Not to me, but some people may really never find it. I suggest making a big navigation sign above it or something, or maybe a more obvious nav design using that same type of box thing, as I really like the box thing..

the http://www.pixelfreak.com/works/16color3.html page looks a little funny in 800x600, since it first appears that nothing happens.. but your houses and work are awesome, the only things I can begin to say are nitpicking!

Actually nitpicking can be a good thing. Sometimes others see things, maybe some little something, that we may have overlooked that needs correcting. Or maybe, say someone nitpicks some tensy little thing and gives you a huge idea that you wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

Occasionally people will post their site for review here and seem to get angry when someone says something negative about their site. You are going to hear a lot of the negative aspects about a site in this forum but you have to keep an open mind and remember that everyone has their own views on things. They have their own style....not to say that one particular style is right or wrong. I believe that web design is an art...a way to express who you are. And if every dang site on the net looked the same well, it would be an awfully boring place to hang out.

There are a lot of people out there who surf the net that are just downright ignorant and, for example, would never figure out that pixel freaks little box is to be used for navigation. I seriously doubt that anyone here would fit into that catagory but I feel that accessibility is a good thing to keep in mind as a designer.

Oh ok....I'll shut my trap. I am just thinking out loud and thought I'd jot down my two cents worth.