Site review

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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thiscatis
Forum Contributor
Posts: 434
Joined: Thu Jul 20, 2006 11:00 am

Site review

Post by thiscatis »

I'm making a website for a client and I'd really like your input on this one.
It's not 100% ready and still have some cleaning up to do to make it 100% valid, but would really appreciate your ideas
Click here
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Ollie Saunders
DevNet Master
Posts: 3179
Joined: Tue May 24, 2005 6:01 pm
Location: UK

Re: Site review

Post by Ollie Saunders »

Really really slick. I have quite a few comments though. I spent a while looking at the site and I'm known for being brutally honest - don't take anything too personality, if you have your reasons why you disagree with me go with them. I'm guessing most of the content has come from the client so I won't comment on that.

In general you seem to have a number of different colours and styles. The design would be made me cohesive and fluid by reducing the number of these. For instance I prefer the #leftmenu list items in black than the green you have them, at first I thought they might have been clickable because they were green. I find the blue of #right .listing a bit jarring on the services page. I don't see the purposing in yet another style of list for #left .columninfo that you use on the references page.

I'm spacing things: try a margin-bottom of 24px on #logo, although the downside of this is that is pushes move of the content down, below the fold. And maybe .bigLeft set to 600px on the services page.

I'm not sure the colour of the hyperlinks is significantly different to get you past the web accessibility guidelines. You could make them more distinguishable by adding an underline, most people are against this though. You could also do with a different :hover and :active for your hyperlinks.

Coloured rectangles to the left of the book photo: only the text is clickable where perhaps the whole thing should be. Separate hover styling would be nice especially since this is inconsistent not to since you have it on the navigation.

You should markup .disc .contactin:nth-item(1) with <address> and perhaps use a definition list for .disc .contactin:nth-item(2).

You have two copywrite statements.
matthijs
DevNet Master
Posts: 3360
Joined: Thu Oct 06, 2005 3:57 pm

Re: Site review

Post by matthijs »

Looks clean, I like that. A few remarks:
- try to align everything just a bit better. It would be nice to follow a consistent grid, for example the boxes of quote and references should be just as wide as the box above it, "welcome". And also the margins withing the boxes. At one moment it's 10px, the other 15 or 20px.
- "welcome" is a horrible text to start with. I know, most often the client gives you that text, but maybe you can convince him to change it to something more meaningful.
- definitely ditch the reflection of the logo. That's so cliche. Like the moving gifs of the 90s ;)
- I'd also not center the text in the 3 footer boxes.
- as ollie said, the hyperlinks are very low contrast. While those are the most important call-to-action words on the page (or they should be). Like "Get in contact now" etc. Just underline them.

Good luck.
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Eran
DevNet Master
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Joined: Fri Jan 18, 2008 12:36 am
Location: Israel, ME

Re: Site review

Post by Eran »

Very nice. A couple of additional remarks:
- The round corners containers below the header (translations / services) look almost like buttons. They demand to be clickable - try making the entire container area clickable.
- Try using one background image for the header buttons (containing both states), and simply change the background positioning on hover. It will get rid of the flickering that goes on now while the image is being fetched from the server.
- Maybe use a slightly larger font as its very small on higher resolutions.

Good work!
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