Review Request : saferpak.com

Welcome to TWF Simon - why not stop by the Introductions section and tell us a bit more about yourself and thanks for doing some reviews before posting your site, nice to know someone reads agreements!

For a first site this isn't bad at all! I like the colours, although I'd like to see a little more of the green in the logo, maybe instead of the grey for the rollover on the link buttons? The little drawings are great too and really add some life to the site.

My only real critisism is the logo/header area. The logo IMO is too small and that top section seems disjointed from the main section.

Well done

First of all, I really like what you've done with the navbar. Nice arrangements of buttons and the grey line along the left side really sets things well. You should add some nicer rollovers to those buttons - perhaps a colour change? I'm not sure. You could try to incorporate the teal from the logo for mouseovers. What I don't like is the animation - it seems to be a little over the top IMO. I would get rid of that and use a plain drop-down. The good news is that it works in my browser (Opera 7) and if it works in Opera there's a pretty good chance it works in everything else that's standard compliant. This site is definitely very easy to navigate.

I agree with Julia about the header area - it looks fine at 800 x 600 but at higher resolutions it's way too spread out. I would make the logo (much) larger, and print the explanation text below it.

Hi, yeah I've never been happy with the top section and will make the logo larger for starters. I am also going to use the orange out of the logo for the top navigation rollover and also on the little triangles on the left navigation mouseover. In the long run I need to sort that top bit properly

Thanks for your advice I am not a designer and those little touches I think will make a big difference. By the way Megan after getting over the shock of the large insect - I got to like your site its very simple, attractive and user friendly.

When Ive made the changes tonight I will let you have a look - see what you think.

Regards,
Simon

i like it alot, colors work good. the only thing that bothered me at first glance is the login form being left aligned. i think it may look better centered in that box.

also banner sizes are typically 468x60 if i remember correctly. your placeholder is a little small. maybe that was your intention.

also a bit of a right margin may help too.

Hi

I got some useful feeback about my site the other day and have made some amendments - just to remind you, the theme was mainly yellow before; it was commented that the logo was too small and that I should try and incorporate colours from the logo into the design and rollovers etc.

http://www.saferpak.com

Thanks,
Simon

I have merged your two threads together so people can refer back to previous posts.

I liked the yellow but I like this green version as well but the logo & quote still seem disjointed from the main section. Are you planning on having banners at the top there? Odd size for a banner if you are!

I agree with Julia. I actually think I liked the yellow better, although this green is fine. That logo still needs to be bigger. One idea would be to have it overlap the green bar at the top and put the navigation next to it.

I didn't see the yellow one so I like this one!

One thing about your nav is it comes down a bit quickly and all the links flash on a bit too quickly too. Good use of colours and I like the way the site is laid out. On the mouseovers why not try encorporating some of that orange into the site a tad bit more?

But I definately like your site etc and it deserves some praise!

You need to compress the images. The page loads like molasses on a cold day.

Take a look at this:

http://www.alogical.com/saferpak/

Your image - navigation_r1_c02.gif =24K
My redo - 0.2K

Your image - forum.gif = 28.5K
My redo - 0.7K

Can you tell which is which?

Add it up.

you need to set the background colour

A little slow to load on dial up (index is 100kb in 30 seconds)

Your navigation isn't working on Opera6 (as opera6)

that left menu, the text comes in weirdly, get rid of that, just have drop down text. -Josh

Josh, no idea what you're on about there, nothing on the left menu comes on weird - at least on IE6 it doesn't.

I think he means that the text sliding in from the left is strange. Might be better to just have them dropdown without sliding in.

what slides in though??

When you click any of the buttons in the left menu, a space is created below the button and occupied by sub-links. The sub-links are not already occupying the space when the menu shifts. Instead, the links fly in from the left, outside the page window, and into the space just created.

I can see this happen in IE6 and Moz1.3.

Simon, also define a page background. Don't depend on the browser showing up a white background as some people change their default browser bg colours. I see the default grey in Moz instead of white.

Ah yeah i see it now!

WOW. I like it a lot. Consistant, conservative. Although you may want to create a title for your newsletter... other than 'occasional'... it's just kinda weird in my opinion. Other than that... way to rock!