SITE REVIEW: http://www.willjw.co.uk

I like the light airy feel that the site gives but I'm not overly keen on the logo as it's far too blurry and actually makes my eyes hurt as they try too hard to focus! The blocks in the background don't help with that either and you end up trying to focus them instead of reading the text.

I'm also not a fan of sites that are just a logo, navigation line, then content plonked on underneath. I prefer some kind of structure to the site, with text broken up with images, different sized text, etc and some kind of design encompassing the whole thing.

Thanks for your input. I have already had people comment on the logo, but assumed people wouldn't need to look at it too much to figure out what it says as it is the same as the site name and the web address (willjw.co.uk) This is purely for university project work (hense the directory location), and what I am concentrating most on at the moment is cross-browser compatability.

With the background image, I am working on a laptop so (depending on how tilted the monitor is) the image looks barely there. Obviously it could do with a little more whitewash?

- Will

I like a lot of your work but I would have to agree about your logo, it made my eyes smart as well

Cant comment on the browser issue, mines ie5.5

I have just made up a new logo. For comparison purposes I have only placed this new logo on the home page.

Please let me know your thoughts.

- Will

Better, in as much as you can read it now but logos are such a personal thing! I'm not overly keen on it as it seems wishy-washy to me but it really depends on the look you are after in general. Yes IMO the background needs to be much more faded but then it may have a tendancy to be too much of a case of something & nothing. I prefer more of a defined graphical layout rather than watermark backgrounds.

I agree about the logo. I think the page needs something stronger there to anchor the page from the top.

In Opera 7, your page content is aligned to the left side of the page while the header and navigation is centered.

The "one, two, three four" links should say Page: or something to indicate what those numbers mean. Either that or use numbers instead of words, I think that would be more clear.

I like what you've done with the background, but it seems different to me on the web design and graphic design pages. The content is covering up there, but it doesn't even look like the same background, as the blue part is much further down the page and doesn't seem to be as wide. Maybe you could make your screen shots smaller and add more spacing in between so the background shows through a little more.

Thanks for giving other sites some good reviews! We appreciate it

Thanks for the reply. I've altered the CSS around a bit so that the background image is always near the top of the page, and added "Page" to the graphics section pages. The reason I didn't use numbers for that was because individual numbers were really small and irritating to click on. Let me know any other views!

And if anyone out there has NS4 could you please check the site and let me know how it goes!

(No problem about my critiques, thanks!)

- Will

If you really want to try your website out on different browsers you can use the Browser Cam.

Although a pay for service you can try the demo and it should allow you enough browsers to get a feel for how the site looks.

I have used Browser Cam on a number of websites, but have come to the conclusion that is time to stop worrying about NS4. Browser Cam offers a number of browsers and platforms to test you site on.

For information based sites having Style Sheets for screen and print are to much of an enhancement to be overlooked, and with the decline in NS4 users the loss of traffic is insignificant.

This leads me to the question, is anyone still designing for NS4 and IE4. These are old browsers, and NS4 does not like style sheets. The first version that fully implimented CSS was NS6 released in 2000.

With an estimated around 1% of users using Netscape 4 as designers how much consideration do you think it is worth? Stats from http://www.w3schools.com/.

Another point, out of this 1% detected how many were designers testing their websites for browser compatibility?

Hope the browser cam link is useful.

It displays ok in NS4.7 but doesn't align the same as Firebird (Mozilla).
In NS4.7 there is no background image, bottom image links have a blue border and the content is left aligned but centered, Ok I just took a look at your screen shot, NS4.7 is how it should be, Mozilla is left aligned (hard left with standard margins)
You need to use the width and height tags on images, I know it's not part of XHTML (really stupid idea leaving it out) but for us modem users the pages can be be jumpy and a pain in the butt trying to read the text while the images load and move everything around.
All linked images in NS4.7 have default blue link border.
I'd be inclined to add some navigation down the bottom of the pages as some pages are very long, might want to compress some of those images as some are timing out on 56k.
the first few graphic design images - terragen?
your source code shows a few which displays as broken image in some browsers but not others, if you want to use a spacer use a transparent image or better yet size your td cells better (or even just add a few 's)

Your CV doesn't line up to well in NS4.7, make your tables 100% (with 50% cells) and shoule be sweet

Barry Tedstone, this site is a good example of NS4.7's support for CSS, this site is XHTML Strict and displays better than in an up to date browser (Mozilla Firebird).
NS6 has a lot of issues with CSS, as does IE6. There are a lot of people still using NS4.x as it's a solid browser and doesnt have the faults of many of todays browsers. I know a lot of people here will disagree and admit they no longer support NS4.x but there is no written rule/law saying we can't still use it.
I still make my sites with it and then test it on newer browsers (I have 8 browsers on my PC).
If you do a search on these forums you'll find more threads on this topic, but remember CSS isn't the bees kness and all of, at the end of the day it shouldn't be what the Jone's have, or what looks great, it should be about accessibility for everyone, abled and disabled ...

The site looks good man and u are designing some cool stuff but that logo just aint right man!