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New website for a sorority

Posted: Thu Feb 02, 2006 11:33 am
by Tehquickness
I was contracted out to do a new website for a sorority on campus ($15/hr woohoo!), and i had worked up a new design for them. They like it but they are just sorority girls and it is doubtful that many of them have much real concept of design. I would appreciate yalls opinion on the website. Link is here. Now this is just the basic frame work, the content is jsut some sample content also. Because of this the links dont work yet. Also the links under In the banner at the top, i am going to have the faded pictures scroll across via flash. Let me know what you think.

Tehquickness

Posted: Thu Feb 02, 2006 12:45 pm
by Roja
- xhtml compliant
- css compliant
- clear layout
- navigation is strong
- font use is reasonable
- Color use is excellent

Overall, I'd give it a solid 7 or 8 out of ten. Very solid design.

Minor nitpicky potential improvements (in my opinion, YMMV):

- Redo the banner graphic. Remove the white bar over the picture by pushing the crest down about 10-20 pixels.
- Give the MG over the red an off-white dropshadow. Not sure it will look good, but the black on red is a little harsh in comparison with the black on white.
- The font for Friendship, Leadership and Service seems "crowded". Not positive that changing the font would be good though.. tough call.
- Not a big fan of the bullets on the nav items.. remove those so you have a margin between the items and the seperator on the right.
- Put at least a tiny footer at the bottom.. the run-to-the-bottom look makes it look like the page did not complete downloading.

Notably, these are extremely nitpicky, not at all absolutely right, and in some cases might be 100% wrong once you test.

The design is solid. Congratulations.

Posted: Thu Feb 02, 2006 2:14 pm
by Chris Corbyn
I love it! That's exactly how I think a web page should look. It's usable, I can read the text, you haven't gone overboard on graphics, the color scheme works and it's compliant!

I'd get yourself a nice cold beer and give yourself a pat on the back ;) Refreshing :)

And if you look at some other threads in this forum you'll see that it's rare to get such a good response! (Especially from Roja :P //Joke :lol: )

Posted: Thu Feb 02, 2006 2:26 pm
by Roja
d11wtq wrote:And if you look at some other threads in this forum you'll see that it's rare to get such a good response! (Especially from Roja :P //Joke :lol: )
With a name like Roja, you gotta know my standards are set high. No //joke needed - I'm an elitist.

Posted: Thu Feb 02, 2006 2:30 pm
by Tehquickness
woohoo! I am glad to hear my design is good. This was my first experience with CSS and I must say it is wonderful, I cant wait to see what comes of it in the future as more and more browsers uniformly display it. I will take Roja's suggestions and try them out, some I know I like (ex. the bullets), but others I know wont work because I already tried it (ex. MG change) but will still strive to improve upon those as well. So goes the design process, it is never really done :lol: even though I wish it could be lol. Web design is a strong possibility for me once I get out of school.

*/EDIT*/
On a later note, the website breaks in IE. Sigh, stupid IE. Nothing major but if you view in IE the dotted lines will be dashed lines instead. I will research a work around.

Posted: Thu Feb 02, 2006 4:12 pm
by Chris Corbyn
Tehquickness wrote:if you view in IE the dotted lines will be dashed lines instead. I will research a work around.
No workaround other than using images at a border width of 1px unfortunately. For some reason IE just uses dashes instead when at 1px :? Go to 2px and things start to look right. Yep... gotta love IE.

Posted: Thu Feb 02, 2006 4:18 pm
by Tehquickness
the site has been updated,
dots removed from links
crest moved down and picture removed to make room for the flash
footer added

what are the rules when it comes to copyrighting stuff? I have always wondered about that.

Posted: Thu Feb 02, 2006 4:33 pm
by Chris Corbyn
Tehquickness wrote:the site has been updated,
dots removed from links
crest moved down and picture removed to make room for the flash
footer added

what are the rules when it comes to copyrighting stuff? I have always wondered about that.
You can just copyright it.. Make sure you include a date and who it's copyright to. If it's your work you're legally entitled to do that ;) Simply stating that it's copyright &copy; 2005-2006 <Your name/business> is fine IMO. Roja may know more about the legalities of this though.

Posted: Thu Feb 02, 2006 5:30 pm
by pickle
I'd suggest making the whole header section about 2/3 to 1/2 the height. ~250px is, in my opinion, WAY to tall for a header. Looking at the page at 800 X 600, it takes almost 1/2 the page. Make the crest smaller too - you can really see the low, blurry quality of the image.

That said, everything else looks really good. An impressive layout - more so as this is your first venture into CSS.

Posted: Thu Feb 02, 2006 6:23 pm
by RobertGonzalez
Dude, that looks really good. Very smooth, very readable. No distracting items pulling your eyes in any one direction. Colors are complimetary. Overall, very nice.

One suggestion, though this is not going to drastically improve it, would be to take the crest and make a light gray translucent background out of the body so you can minimize the size of the header. That might allow more content to be viewed in smaller resolution browsers. But even if you left it the way it is it is still nice.

Posted: Thu Feb 02, 2006 6:55 pm
by Tehquickness
I like the suggestion about the smaller header. When i think about it the res on my laptop is 1920x1200 (awesome i know :lol: ). I guess normal people dont really use that resolution. So I have made it smaller.

As far as what Everah was saing I am not quite sure that i follow you when you say:
everah wrote:would be to take the crest and make a light gray translucent background out of the body so you can minimize the size of the header.
I am not sure what that means. If i could get a clarification that would be nice.
Thanks for the advice and encouragement.

Posted: Thu Feb 02, 2006 11:29 pm
by RobertGonzalez
Check out the CSS demo site Foot Bag Freaks. See the light gray kicker in the background of the body content area, behind the latest news headlines? That is what I am talking about.

It might not work for you, but it might also allow you to shorten the height of the header image just a pinch. Like I said, it is still very good work as it is.

Posted: Wed Feb 08, 2006 4:00 pm
by Tehquickness
I see what you mean I will look into that and see how it comes up.

Posted: Wed Feb 08, 2006 4:16 pm
by hawleyjr
I'm sorry until I can see photos of the sorority members I can't tell you how I like the usability...

Posted: Wed Feb 08, 2006 8:43 pm
by Tehquickness
hahahaha. I am going to be working on that. They will be up pretty soon. They have some good looking girls, of course they also have some fatties too.