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.
The site is going to be a political blog with a few extra features based on generating a league table of ministers. Does the design scream "awesome Web 2.0 blog" to you? What do you think of the menu being in the middle of the page? Do you like the big text?
(There's a couple of layout issues like spacing in IE and chart position icons in Opera ... so look at it in Firefox for now )
1. Change the background outside the main frame (light grey ?). I have a 1680x1050 display and the white space on the outside draws the eye more than the actual information.
2. In the second column (links).. Cannot distinguish other than the text that they are links.
Obviously these are very personal observations, feel free to say "what a load of *******" and ignore me....
CoderGoblin wrote:1. Change the background outside the main frame (light grey ?). I have a 1680x1050 display and the white space on the outside draws the eye more than the actual information.
This is presumably a problem you see on most fixed width sites, right?
CoderGoblin wrote:2. In the second column (links).. Cannot distinguish other than the text that they are links.
Links will be underlined and a different colour (blue probably). I'm a bit of an accessibility nut ... it's just the dummy content isn't linked yet.
onion2k wrote:
This is presumably a problem you see on most fixed width sites, right?
Most sites which I have seen which are fixed width don't have a white background with a white background for the main body. Most of them use either a flat colour or a graphic of some description as the <body> background.
Between line-height and font-size, line-height is more important. Font size is merely a recommendation. A larger font-size would be nicer. Also, do you have any real text that you can use? I don't assume that every blog post will simply be a large block of text without paragraph breaks.
The blog needs to allow uses to override the font size with their browser settings (an accessibility issue) so I've intentionally left it as flexible as possible. Regarding the dummy content ... I'm not going to be the person writing it so as yet I don't have proper text.
onion2k wrote:The blog needs to allow uses to override the font size with their browser settings (an accessibility issue) so I've intentionally left it as flexible as possible. Regarding the dummy content ... I'm not going to be the person writing it so as yet I don't have proper text.
Allowing the user to change the font size is fine. What I'm suggesting is to make the default larger and to increase the line-height. People generally don't use text-size changing options, and line-height isn't easily changeable.
Basically, the text is difficult to read by default. This makes it inaccessible. Giving people the option of changing font size is all fine and good, but don't make you lazy.
CoderGoblin wrote:1. Change the background outside the main frame (light grey ?). I have a 1680x1050 display and the white space on the outside draws the eye more than the actual information.