REVIEW REQUEST: www.seemecreate.com

Hello
I must say it looks like an old newspaper with your choice of colours.. untill i clicked on the links that was, then i saw where your coming from, i like the affect very much, ill have to view this again when im wide awake as it is very early and ive been awake most of the night hehe..
Good luck with the site.

You are right about it not being "traitional" but I like the concept.

I don't know if you are finished with the layout/graphics but it sorta looks unfinished. I think the main thing for me is the fact that the logo at the top left are apart from the menu. Just seems like those should be connected in some way. Also, I think I would have the gray part change to the same color as each page. The gray is ok by itself but when you change the colors, the gray takes away from the effect you are trying to get...IMO.

I like the big font size effect you have for the title in the body of each page. It's different. Nice effect.

I'll be watching this one to see what you do with it.

Different and thus quite interesting! Very nice.

FWIW, I only clicked on the links after reading the other posts on this thread. Somehow I didn't see or understand the links on the top left to be navigation elements. But heck, could be just me, ask others if they felt that way.

-Mike

I agree - those nav links should definitely be more identifiable. Otherwise I find the concept here to be very interesting. The page transitions and colour changes are neat without being annoying. There's a fine balance in there that I think you've found the answer to.

One thing - I don't know if this is just a temporary thing or not but be careful about setting text with full justification. I think things generally look better left aligned - the spacing between words looks really odd there. Maybe you just need to fiddle with the font sizing to get that to look right.

I just love justified alignment, but I think you are right Megan, the odd spacing just ends up looking funky - and I don't want to fiddle with the size on every new entry.

The most common comment has been that the nav may be a little vague, I am trying to think of the best way to address the links - make them more noticable, without making them look "cheesy".

Anyone have any suggestions?

--disaster-master
I think you are on to something... What would you think about the menu section changing color as well - to lets say... a lighter color of the current section color. Like on about, it changes orange - and the menu background turns a lighter roange.

Thanks so far everyone!

The Site is quite interesting ........... hmmmm
I wonder if it will get slow when you add all the images ... Will they be loading in advance or be called once clicked ?

I like the color changing part on the pages the best.

cader

Quote: I think you are on to something... What would you think about the menu section changing color as well - to lets say... a lighter color of the current section color. Like on about, it changes orange - and the menu background turns a lighter roange.

Yes!!! That sounds great. At the time, I was thinking the 'same' color but I think a lighter color would be even better.

Well, I took your advice and ran - I made a few other changes as well. What do you think?

http://63.166.206.4/seemecreate/color.htm

Great idea disaster-master, thanks!

Oh sorry - the changes I made:

1.) I tried to make the nav more prominent (sp?) by adding mouse overs and a border.

2.) Removed the justified alignment - you were right Megan

3.) The menu background now changes.

4.) Tweaked the colors a bit.

I didn't see your post there cader, sorry.

To reply, I don't know what I'm going to do exactly. The whole website is loaded - only one page and no other trips to the server. First mountain to climb is the amount of javascript to process. There is an awefull lot of work needed to be done to initiate the DHTML engine and create the object library, but I still think it's faster than a flash site with similar functionality (I don't care for flash, although I know it has it's place). The projects will be the biggest hurdle, I thought of pre-loading, but that would take a long time - the status bar would be busy for minutes, and that looks like the page isn't completely loaded - thus I would have my users tapping their fingers for too long. I will probably still have this problem anyways though, all the images are hard coded and not referenced - so they will all need to load first. In short, I'm not sure what to do yet, I thought about data-binding and pulling section info from external XML files - but not all browsers support this yet. I'll just see how the current set up works, any suggestions would be appreciated.

First up you need to set your background colour

I got a javascript error in ie5 (sorry forgot to copy it) but it wont do it again, the file images (and links) aren't showing in ie5 on the color page/site

I like the layout, it's different but the 'info' and 'work' labels above the links on the color page are a little confusing

I like the picture on the about page lol

I like that. Much better than the gray.

Another suggestion. To mark the page users are on, you could make the little square in the nav beside the appropriate link and page a darker color maybe. ?? To clarify what I am trying to say, if you are on the news page, the sqaure to the left of the news link would be the darker green.

The text does look better left aligned rather than justified.

Nice looking site, don't really have anything to add except to ask have you thought how the search engines wont like it?

I'll address these in order:

Busy
ok, I set the background color. I need to change my default bg color to grey so that I catch that, I always forget - thanks. I need to install 5.0 again and see what that error is - I have a feeling that my events are fireing before the object library is completed. Also, I agree with you on the "info" and "work" titles, I think that the menu is self-explanitory, so I just removed them completely.

disaster-master
Good idea! I first re-arranged the menu (blocks to the left of items), then I created mouse-overs for each link to change color to the corresponding section - finally, like you suggested, i have the block hold color on the selected section. Looks great.

The Webmistress
No actually - I havn't. And I HAVE GOT to get better at that. Any suggestions that you have that could beef up my search engine compatibility, without compromising design, would be fantastic.

Thanks!

I like how the one colored square tells you what page you are on but I don't think I would have the other small squares change color on rollover too. I would just mark the current page with its color and let the others have the while rollover where the text is. IMO, all those different colors in one little space takes away from the effect you are trying to achieve.

See what the others think before you change it though.

You aren't going to do well with that site and the search engines as they like sites that have pages! 5 or 6 pages to a site is really a minimum and this one effectively only has one.

Julia has a point about the search engines.

As neat as the effects are with this, it won't do you much good if people can't find it. Isn't it just awful when you have a great idea and it doesn't work like you want it to?

I was thinking...... You could do this same layout in XHTML and CSS and boy would it be fast. (took almost 4 minutes for the page to load on my dial-up the first time but I do have a crappy connection) You could get your ranking, be accessible to all with one design and look good all at the same time if you switched. But don't let me talk you into anything. HAHA!!!

You know that we will support you either way you go but Julia is right.

Webmistress is right, you'll never get anywhere in Google with only one page, it'd be interesting to see how Googles' spidering algorithm would react to the links on the page...I presume it can parse JavaScript?

All-in-all it'd be better to have a site with multiple pages, there wouldn't be a need for such a massive amount of JavaScript, which'd make coding easier. Also people with dial-ups wouldn't be waiting for ages. The 'cutting edge' idea is really cool, but is it cool for the sake of cool, or for functionality? Also it is quite easy to break, I managed to get the slides to stop working correctly on more than one occasion, text can sometimes disappear when selecting it, and the bottom of the slides sometimes disappear as well.

I love the updated look of the site, the colour schemes stand-out and really compliment the quirky design. I also like the idea of not using Flash...That's a step in the right direction as far as Search Engines are concerned!

Overall: The look and feel is great, but I don't think the rest of the world is ready for such cutting edge design!!!