What's it missing?

It doesn't matter if you do all the error checking in the world, or if you have the most beautiful graphics, if your site or application design isn't usable, it's not going to do well. Get input and advice on usability and user interface issues here.

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WithHisStripes
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What's it missing?

Post by WithHisStripes »

Heya,
So I am designing this website: http://www.firstcause.org/curt but I feel like it's really missing something, can you guys give some input?

Thanks! Spence
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neophyte
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Post by neophyte »

I like the over all design: the logo background and colors. I don't like the rollovers to the dark color. They disappear especially on the left hand nav. I don't like sites with two spots for navigation. Even if they don't repeat it's confusing to users. I made that mistake once before. I'm not crazy about the 'torn paper' shapes. If you're going for torn paper... scan some torn paper and use gifs or something....

Hope my criticism was constructive....

:wink:
WithHisStripes
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Post by WithHisStripes »

Great, thanks so much. Yeah, I agree about the split navigation, but the organization I am designing it for won't have it any other way... :/ meh, but yeah, the torn shapes are tricky, I want to add texture to it so they fit in a bit more, but you're not the only one that didn't like them, you have any advice on a replacement item??

Thanks!
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feyd
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Post by feyd »

the page is insanely heavy.. the main banner/logo graphic is over 100K 8O. The text links on the left blend pretty heavily into the background..
WithHisStripes
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Post by WithHisStripes »

Yeah I totally noticed that, even on a DSL line, but I don't know what I can do to reduce the filesize, any tips?
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John Cartwright
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Post by John Cartwright »

Use less graphics, or atleast design them to be repeatable.
Ie, instead of one large image as your background, let it repeat multiple smaller textures.

Worse comes to worse, change your image format to gif, which generally has lower filesizes..

or you can reduce the quality of the images
WithHisStripes
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Post by WithHisStripes »

Good thinking, I have to redesign the background images anyway, thanks!
Roja
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Post by Roja »

It's not valid html: http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1 ... .org/curt/ .

The color scheme makes it very hard to read the text (The "our" in our first cause is almost impossible to see).

The login prompt is in a no-mans land: tiny text, nothing near it, hard to see.

The red and black 'torn' graphics look childish, not the style they were hoping for, I suspect.

There is far too large of a gap between the top of the graphic and the text in both "This weeks" and the news section in the middle left.

You use tables for layouts in some things that could *easily* be done with css instead (The top two bars, the login href, and the footer).

Your png images are *enourmous*, try using pngcrush to reduce their size, or alternatively, when saving them, use only 256 colors to reduce the complexity. Frame.png alone is over 100k for a 800x80 image, when I have the same size image done in under 30k on another page. The real nightmare is document_enlarged though.. 487k!!! The recommendation is for everything on a page to be under *30k*, that one image is more than ten times that!

It would take over 3 minutes to load this page on a 56k modem. Thats insanity.

You have inline stylesheets and external (why not all external, so it can be cached?).

The list goes on..
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