www.13thbombsquadron.org

TheGizmoid's picture

They have: 168 posts

Joined: Apr 2001

Hello, everyone, I'm new here!

After reading the announcement at the top of the page, I spent several hours going through some sites and offering my reviews, so I am hoping a few people here will offer me theirs as well.

http://www.13thbombsquadron.org/

This is a site for a Korean War-era USAF veterans association. I'm not a professional designer, this is a labor of love for me.

The site is simple, no frames, java/javascript, flash, animation, etc. My purpose was to make it as accessible across various browsers/versions as possible, including WebTV and AOL. Also to make it fast loading on dial-up connections.

The real focus is on the content. I've worked with the association's historian for over two years. He emails me raw scans and text, I do the Photoshop and graphics work and organize it.

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

Megan's picture

She has: 11,421 posts

Joined: Jun 1999

Welcome to TWF! I enjoyed reading your reviews in the other threads - I hope you decide to stick around, we could use your advice!

As for your site, it looks quite good. It seems that you have very honourable goals - many more experienced designers tend to overlook simple basics such as download speeds and the other things you mentioned.

The logo/header looks very nice, although I would try to do something different with the "association" part - maybe try changing the background of it from black to red so it blends in better.

Now that I'm looking at your content, I'm wondering where your navigation bar is. I guess you don't have to have a navbar per se, but you should try to do something differently to make it more obvious that those pictures link to your site content. I would also make the table fixed width insted of flexible in this case - I have my resolution set at 1024, and the centered headlings are much wider than the photos and it doesn't look as nice as it does at a 800 x 600. It would also be nice if that text was a little bigger - it's a tad bit hard to read.

Okay, now that I've clicked on one of your links, I see that you do have a navbar here. The problem with this is that there are too many things on it. There have been studies done showing that the human brain can only keep 5-8 options in the memory at a time, which means that list of options with more than 5-8 items can be confusing. You might want to try to divide these up into some sort of categories - even a simple space between the buttons will indicate to people that the groups belong to different cateogries.

In the content area, I would like to see those pictures a little bit bigger without having to click on them. Also, you need to look at this at 1024 - things are kind of getting out of wack - they pictures don't seem to be aligned the way you'd want them to be.

Fringey's picture

They have: 68 posts

Joined: Apr 2001

I agree with megan on this, in 1024 it looks odd because the pictures are all spaced out and the captions are wider than the pictures. Settina width would fix it, and if you do, than you might want to try putting a space between the table and the big picture of the flag.

The coloring on the sub pages is okay, the only thing is that the bright red on bright blue REALLY clashes and hurts my poor eyes. Change the olor or tone down one of the shades to it isn't as blinding.

on the 'perspective' page and some others the text should be left aligned, the layout will 'fit' more that way...

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