Site check

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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neophyte
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Site check

Post by neophyte »

Hey all I just created a new site.

http://webgeneius.com/goopgallery

Along with the site I'm releasing another version of GOOP G - 2.0.

Feel free to download it and try it.

Let me know what you think.

Thanks!
matthijs
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Post by matthijs »

Looks good to me. Very clear design. Easy to navigate. Only minor nitpick: I personally find the colors a bit too bright/hard. I would prefer the colors to be more desaturated.
I will download the script and check it out.
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RobertGonzalez
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Location: Fremont, CA, USA

Post by RobertGonzalez »

Nice site. You might want to consider making the content portion of the site fluid in layout instead of a fixed width (unless you plan on using the wide open left and right sides). I like the colors and the flow of the page. Valid Transitional HTML. Your CSS doesn't completely validate:

Errors
URI : http://webgeneius.com/goopgallery/styles.css
  • Line: 77 Context : #gg_descrip
    Invalid number : float attempt to find a semi-colon before the property name. add it
  • Line: 78 Context : #gg_descrip
    Invalid number : left attempt to find a semi-colon before the property name. add it
Everything else is pretty clean. I like the application too. I am going to be downloading it. If it does what it looks like it does, I will more than likely implement a version of it.
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Chris Corbyn
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Post by Chris Corbyn »

Everah wrote:Nice site. You might want to consider making the content portion of the site fluid in layout instead of a fixed width (unless you plan on using the wide open left and right sides).
Clearly a personal preference but I'm still kinda into how fixed-width layouts look. They create a "page" sort of effect. A halfway house would be an elastic layout (centered div, ~70-90% width).

Nice site, I like it :D
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RobertGonzalez
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Post by RobertGonzalez »

d11wtq wrote:
Everah wrote:Nice site. You might want to consider making the content portion of the site fluid in layout instead of a fixed width (unless you plan on using the wide open left and right sides).
Clearly a personal preference...
Absolutely. I should have qualified that in my original reply. I have a thing with using the entire screen. Personally I compare it to using only the middle 70% of your living room. You have the room. Why not use it? But again, this is entirely a personal opinion.
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Ambush Commander
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Post by Ambush Commander »

Okay. This is really nit-picky, but if you've got nothing better to do... ;-)

Turn off CSS. You notice several things:

* The menu list is above the first heading. Maybe that's not the best idea. You're formatting h1 the same as h2, instead, if you need something to appear when the background image is gone, try marking it display:none
* The picture, which was floated, now is sorta dangling in front of the text. If it's floated, float a parent div, not the img itself. Then the picture will get its own line

Maybe a few more META tags describing the page would be helpful. Be sure to link back to your main site once you've got inbound links.

Kudos for...

* Line-spacing. A small space between lines improves readability a lot.
* Smart design. I like your style!
* Remembering to set margin:0 and padding:0 for body.
* Airy layout. Solid walls of text are intimidating

Also...

* The cute kid picture is a bit weightier than it should be (in file size) Since you're using solid blocks of color as well as a photograph, you may want to consider using PNG instead of JPEG.
* A bit of a spacing discrepancy after the Server Requirements before the dashed line. Probably you should add a margin to the dashed line: collapsing margins will take care of overlaps

More things:

http://webgeneius.com/goopgallery/features.php - you're using span class="heading" to display the headings as blocks. This causes problems both contextually and without CSS. Just use h2 or something like that

http://webgeneius.com/goopgallery/download.php - uncapitalized download links and sparse text makes it feel like this page was thrown together on the fly

:-D
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neophyte
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Post by neophyte »

Thanks for all the input!

I reset the width of the site to 70% and removed the fixed 760px.

I took care of some of the odd spacing issues.

I added an invisible h1 header at the top of the page (display: none;).

I fixed the css validation errors.

Got rid of the misused span tags on the features page.

I found an error in the zip I put up for GOOP Gallery. There was some missing files. So if you downloaded it earlier you might want to try again.

Again thanks for all of you input - it was more than I expected and I do appreciate the "nit picking".

Further comments welcome!
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