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original thread http://vbforums.com/showthread.php?t...ht=Peer+Review
Basicly the same thing. I changed some things, and used some ideas I got from the above thread.
http://netnsite.com
Give it a look, let me know what you think, and be brutal. Think of it in terms of being someone looking to hire a programmer.
Thanks for your comments and all your help(even if I argue with you).
That's not true.... as long as one has flash, it doesn't matter the browser. Worked fine for me in Fx.Quote:
Originally Posted by from the web site
The title of your splash screen is "Splash Screen" and I'm still left as to wondering what those circles flying by are. Also there's nothing there to make me want to click on anything.
Pass. Next resume please...
-tg
Mystery meat is bad.
And by that I am referring to the opening flash. Its will be too confusing for some to get past with the buttons flying by with no way to know what they do unless you mouse over them.
You need a little bit of a left margin in your news section for the cells with the news in them.
Other than that, looks nice, but at full screen you have ALOT of empty real estate on the right. Maybe you can go ahead and center up the main content and extend it out some.
0. I only criticize. I never compliment. (Nice buttons effect, btw)
1.
is too amateurish, unless you wish to let everyone know that you are an amateur.Code:text-decoration: underline+overline;
2. Give your news items a title, not a date+time. Make them readable over the dark background.
3. Reduce your font size.
4. Give your tables a cellpadding value.
5. Make your resume page better. It looks hastily put together. Bad borders too.
6. Make font usage consistent. Times New Roman is now an unattractive font.
And while black on black may have worked for Metallica's Balck album.... it doesn't work for this.... the name gets lost, the whole thing is very hard to read, there's no contrast in the text.
-tg
Mixing and matching fonts is bad, mmkay?
BTW, It doesn't require either Flash or Internet Explorer. I'm sitting here with Portable Firefox and I refuse to install Flash. The site works, just no animations. I saw the links at the bottom of the front page, but they are a bit small and squished together.
Now the review -
First impressions are bad to start, since I dont have Flash. But never mind that. I found the Home link alright. Text looks a bit squished though. And like you didn't set a font.
Home page looks like one of the thousands of PHP-Nuke templates around. Circuit board with random shapes and hard edges sawn out look has been done before. Many, many, times.
Blue links - looks like you didn't set a colour there. Hard to read against your background. BTW, long dark to light gradients do not work. I have a dodgy laptop monitor - it looks baaad. You can avoid this by using only slight gradients, never a huge drawn out change in colour. Keep the styling consistent, have a couple of main colours plus a tint colour, etc. At the moment the main title and the newsposts titles do not match. Looks as if you copy and pasted the news posts image from somewhere else.
Now the posts themselves. They seem to be floating in the middle of nowhere, particularly at the top of the page above the background gradient. Need to integrate their look more into the rest of the page. Titles are hard to read, and the dates alone meaningless, especially in the all-numeric format you've used. Top post says to me 4th of October 2006. Change it so it uses the month name to avoid confusion like this. Give each post a headline. And change the font colour, or background - Black on dark blue is very hard to read.
The line spacing at the top and bottom of each post is inconsistent. Some have a blank line at the top but not the bottom, others one at the bottom, and others both.
Collapsable posts are neat, but poorly implemented. There is nothing suggesting that you can collapse them and I found it completely by accident (I was checking for tables by Ctrl+clicking, a Firefox trick to select a table cell).
Random lines at the bottom of the page? Looks odd. And the only way to navigate to another page (in my Flash-less state) is the tiny links at the bottom. Evil.
Now the Portfolio. It's grim and dark. I can't read it. Next.
Resume - Again, can't read a thing. Waaay to dark. And the font size is too small within the table.
Same goes for Contact page - too dark again.
Overall - For someone that lists HTML and CSS under their programming languages, it looks like a first attempt at using Photoshop and Frontpage. The table layout - I could forgive that if you had not listed CSS, but to do both screams incompetency. The visual design is terrible, can't read the content, which is the whole purpose of the site. And Flash objects on the front page and main title without fallback replacements - bad.
Verdict - Rubbish. With tg - Next!
Do take our suggestions seriously though. I gave up in the last thread because all you seemed to want to do was argue. Trust me, after a while of doing this sort of thing, you eventually learn how counter-productive that is.
On the design front, if you're short for ideas (I suck at coming up with design ideas) check out this site: bwdow.com. Most of them are fairly out there, but there are some neat looks.
- P
Mmm... don't do it, mmkay?Quote:
Originally Posted by penagate
ugh frontpage... now I feel dirty.. yeah, I've always had trouble coming up with designs for my own site... thinking of myself as artistic and somewhat of a designer I always want it to look cool. what font mix and match are we talking about? I know there is some on the resume but other than that it is set to arial in the style sheet
what's a php nuke? and um if a newbie photoshop user can do that I'm going to have to give up lol
Splash Screen:
here was my original logic behind the splash screen. I want to display my flash abilities and my graphic abilities. I wanted something that looks neat/cool.
I'm still thinking on scrapping the current site and archiving it, because there are things I don't like about it. A lot of which you guys have mentioned, but at the same time some of these things every design is going to have... for instance the screen area at 1280x1024 is huge if maximized and my content just can't fill it all, I mean I'm not MSN or Yahoo, I can center the content though or something along those lines
One thing I wanted to avoid was the standard white background with the upsidedown L layout with no depth that almost every site has.
If you look at the design section of my poirtfolio look at the early netnsite version tell me if that is better
I'm thinking on scarping the splash screen and just archiving it to my porfolio, but I don't know I like it and think it's a good bit of art
see I am wondering if I should just do something simple like this http://www.redesignsolutions.ro/ I mean no it's not eye catching, yes I've seen a site just like it before, but I've seen sites like it because it is easy on the eye and it does it's job
And don't worry about influancing me too much you guys are really just re-enforcing things I thought already
That looks alright. 3 columns always looks very classy when done right. :)
I just wanted you guys to see where some of my ideas sprang from
http://eyeball-design.com/index3.htm <-- thought my buttons where bad.. at least they stop ~_^
http://eyeball-design.com/fxzone/index01.htm <-- I've always loved this thing
http://www.2advanced.net/?a=111112
Something else came to mind. The line breaks in the news panels everyone has the exact same line breaksfor some reason the html isn't taking the breaksCode:<br>body<br><br>
The expand/collapse deal is Asp.Net server control I'm working on so there may be something going on with it, I dunno yet I'm still drinking coffee and yawning...
and those damn two lines at the bottom of the news are something with the datagrid there are no styles set for them. For some reason when the DataGrid is pulling my news xml and paging the content the grid adds an empty item/altItem
Those rollpanels as I named the control are actually pretty cool. Toggle some browse some and come back and look at them. Also check out the way the news remembers what page of news you were reading...
http://www.carpediematwork.com/Quote:
Originally Posted by penagate
This site was listed on there, I really like the bottle of juice effect.
I made a minor change; I changed the caption bar of the panels to match the menu bar. I had it like this before but I wanted to try it another way. I'm also looking at another style for the links that fall over the black to gray gradiant; I knew they where whack already ;), but the gradiant makes it a chalenge unless I go with like coral or orange
man, firefox and css have issues... I know what your going to say lol, but they do. no support of cursor, it totaly just whacked out on the panels which are fine in IE still... I mean why would I want padding to effect the background...? and the 3px miscalc of objects.. photoshop says 28, IE 28, FF 25 ***..? a pixel is a pixel is a pixel? twip?
The thing I found to most anoying was having to click controls to activate them, especially the main menu. I'm guessing that's a flash 8 thing. Which just gives me another reason not to use flash for menus.....
changed a bunch of link colors fixed the fire fox thing and stopped paging the news till I can write new paging code with out a datagrid
Usability over art!Quote:
I'm thinking on scarping the splash screen and just archiving it to my porfolio, but I don't know I like it and think it's a good bit of art
Why not have another bash at the flsh thing if you want to demonstrate your skills but come up way in which the flash enhances usability or adds to the features of the site rather than just a splash screen. A flash photo gallery perhaps.
ok, I lost the splash screen. I'm going to add it to the flash section as soon as I get some of my other flash stuff ready to post
oh, yeah! Those of you with flash, how well is it running? Is it slow? Jerky? Steak? Chiken Tar Tar?