JaoudeStudios release v4.2 :: opinions please...

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jaoudestudios
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JaoudeStudios release v4.2 :: opinions please...

Post by jaoudestudios »

Hi All,

I have redone my website (content not design) and was just wondering on your first impressions on all of it as a whole. There is still a lot more I want to do with it, but depending on your feed back I will priorities what I will do next.

Be gentle :wink:

Oops I forgot to add a link http://www.jaoudestudios.com (it was in my signature too :P )
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califdon
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Re: JaoudeStudios release v4.2 :: opinions please...

Post by califdon »

There's a lot to like about your resdesign. One small spelling error, to get it out of the way: two L's in Collaboration (on your menu).

It's easy on the eyes (an important quality to me). I would try to get your menu on one line, perhaps by reducing the font size of the menu. I'm using a 1024x768 resolution monitor, so those with higher-res monitors will no doubt see it as one line, but not everyone does. The Contact menu item wraps to the second line for me, and since it already requires vertical scrolling to see everything, the extra line just makes that a tiny bit worse.

I have a personal reaction that may not be typical, but I noticed and was slightly bothered by the partial, but not full correspondence between the items on your menu and the boxes below, on your Overview page. I would prefer to see either an item-for-item correspondence or completely different items. As it is, I find it distracting to find Blog on the menu, but not in a box below; and boxes for Recent Forum Posts, Projects, and Coding Standards, but no corresponding menu items.

I'm not a professional web designer, so I'm sure others will have comments about features that I don't even think about.
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jaoudestudios
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Re: JaoudeStudios release v4.2 :: opinions please...

Post by jaoudestudios »

Thanks for your quick responce.

I have adjusted the spelling mistake on the navigation, I cant believe I missed that.

Ah I am on a 28inch monitor at HD, so I did not realise it wraps. I will definitely sort that out first thing tomorrow morning.

I do appreciate what you are saying abou the navigation and boxes below, so this does require my attention, I just need to think which way to take it - probably make it completely different like you suggested.

I look forward to hearing more comments.
Thanks again califdon
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Re: JaoudeStudios release v4.2 :: opinions please...

Post by matthijs »

Ok one quick note after a first 20-sec impression: the site looks nice and clean. but what I miss is hierarchy. What I mean with that: something to lead the eye/visitor from most important to less important items. As it is now, almost everything has the same visual weight, and I'm not sure what to look at first. There are a lot of boxes about different things, from feeds to forum posts to some text info, but everything is equally important. Besides not knowing what to look at first, the lack of hierarchy also makes it difficult to guess the exact purpose of the site. Is it a developer's site offering his services? Or is it a developer's portal for developers to learn stuff and chat on a forum?

Of course I'm not familiar with the exact purposes of your site, so depending on that you might make different choices for what's important or not.

But say the goal of the site is (since you're a developer) to get new clients. Then that should be made very clear, in a big box at the top with bigger/bold characters.

Anyway, that's just a quick impression. The site is very nice and clean. Let me know what you think about what I said
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Re: JaoudeStudios release v4.2 :: opinions please...

Post by jaoudestudios »

Thanks for your feedback matthijs.

I understand your point of weighting, I think this is very important and i over looked it. I might try and combined your weighting idea with califdon idea of the boxes. So the boxes are the important pages.

The goal of the site is important too. I want to make it a more for developers rather than a site to get new clients. I will attempt to make this more clear.
The site is very nice and clean
Thanks :)
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jaoudestudios
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Re: JaoudeStudios release v4.2 :: opinions please...

Post by jaoudestudios »

I have moved the Collaboration link from the top in the main navigation to the developers section. Hopefully this will now fit on all screens (well most).

The rest of the changes unfortunately are going to have to wait until I get back tomorrow night. However, I will be able to login to here and chat to you all more about it.

Thanks again.
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Re: JaoudeStudios release v4.2 :: opinions please...

Post by pickle »

My initial reaction was positive. Clearly laid out, calm colour scheme. Not bad.

Looking into it further, I did notice a few things:
  • The top menu has a little bit of blue underneath it. That may be by design, but my initial gut reaction is that it looks like bad styling - like you forgot to take off the bottom padding.
  • Add some padding in your menu - make it taller so there's more room between the text and the edge of the tan bar
  • Your recent forum posts are extending beyond the bottom of the box
  • In your contact box, make your text fields lighter. The contrast could be improved. Also, make the 'Send' button and the textfields a different colour. Having them look the same might confuse some people (at least initially) as to what rectangle does what function.
  • Fix your <textarea> to have the same font family & size as your other text fields.
  • Curious why Infrastructure, About, and Contact have /index/ in the URL?
  • The links in the Developers are not initially obvious. Why not move them down below the text that explains what the page is for?
  • The really wide <select> box in your contact is relatively difficult to use. I have to focus on the arrow on the far right to determine it's a <select>, then focus back on the far left to read the articles. When I'm selecting something in a <select> box, I generally move my mouse over the item I'm selecting. If I've moved my mouse over to the right, I now have to move it back to the left. Long story short, don't make it 100% width.
  • Cool idea with your CAPTCHA - but I'd suggest mentioning exactly what it's for.
  • Again - make your "Send" button look different than the rest of your fields. I've also found that some people don't recognize a button as a button when it's really wide like that.
Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.
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jaoudestudios
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Re: JaoudeStudios release v4.2 :: opinions please...

Post by jaoudestudios »

Hi Pickle,

Thanks for the comments, I have set aside time this weekend to go through your recommendations and work them in.

What browser are you using?
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pickle
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Re: JaoudeStudios release v4.2 :: opinions please...

Post by pickle »

Oh right - sorry. I'm using FF 3.0.11
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Re: JaoudeStudios release v4.2 :: opinions please...

Post by jaoudestudios »

Thanks again for your feedback. I am using the same browser and version as you so I am not sure why it looks so different in some cases. Are you on linux or windows?

I have addressed the issues you mentioned below...
pickle wrote:The top menu has a little bit of blue underneath it. That may be by design, but my initial gut reaction is that it looks like bad styling - like you forgot to take off the bottom padding.
The blue is there by design, it looks good for me - could you possibly take a screen shot?
pickle wrote:Add some padding in your menu - make it taller so there's more room between the text and the edge of the tan bar
Done
pickle wrote:Your recent forum posts are extending beyond the bottom of the box
Mine does not, but just incase I have shortened the list by 1.
pickle wrote:In your contact box, make your text fields lighter. The contrast could be improved. Also, make the 'Send' button and the textfields a different colour. Having them look the same might confuse some people (at least initially) as to what rectangle does what function.
I have made it a completely different colour.
pickle wrote:Fix your <textarea> to have the same font family & size as your other text fields.
I made it slightly smaller so more could fit in the box - I am still on the fence about this one.
pickle wrote:Curious why Infrastructure, About, and Contact have /index/ in the URL?
They are simple pages so belong to my default controller, I dont think they require their own controller.
pickle wrote:The links in the Developers are not initially obvious. Why not move them down below the text that explains what the page is for?
Appreciate what you are saying, but on the fence
pickle wrote:The really wide <select> box in your contact is relatively difficult to use. I have to focus on the arrow on the far right to determine it's a <select>, then focus back on the far left to read the articles. When I'm selecting something in a <select> box, I generally move my mouse over the item I'm selecting. If I've moved my mouse over to the right, I now have to move it back to the left. Long story short, don't make it 100% width.
I do agree, but it will break my design if I dont make it 100%, so I need to think of styling the page up differently
pickle wrote:Cool idea with your CAPTCHA - but I'd suggest mentioning exactly what it's for.
I would have thought people would know what this is now, if not they should not be using the internet - but definitely a fair point so I have put it in.
pickle wrote:Again - make your "Send" button look different than the rest of your fields. I've also found that some people don't recognize a button as a button when it's really wide like that.
It says 'send', I think that is pretty obvious, but changing the colour is not difficult. But not having it so wide would again break my design, so that requires more thought.

NB: I have also made changes according to the comments mentioned further up in the thread.
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Re: JaoudeStudios release v4.2 :: opinions please...

Post by pickle »

I'm using OS X.

Here's the screenshot.
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jaoudestudios
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Re: JaoudeStudios release v4.2 :: opinions please...

Post by jaoudestudios »

Thanks!

That looks fine to me, the blue shadow is meant to be there under the tanned navigation bar.
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Re: JaoudeStudios release v4.2 :: opinions please...

Post by onion2k »

:|

I'm going to have to take a different stance to everyone else I'm afraid. I really don't like it. Sorry...
  • No mission. There's no obvious mission for the website. What's it for? Why would anyone read it? Is it advertising something? Informing people? Selling something? It seems to be a personal site (About, Blog, etc), but then the tag line says it's a "Developers Portal". I'm confused.
  • Menu Contrast. The design of the main navigation menu is far too bland. Nothing stands out. There's no "call to action" to make me click on anything.
  • Index page boxes. The order of the boxes on the index page is weird. Why are RSS, recent posts and contact form more important than collaboration, projects and coding standards?
  • Contact form on the index page. Having the contact form on the index is non-standard and unusual. That's very bad. It confuses people.
  • Contact forms are different. The contact form on the index is different to the contact form on the contact page. Why? Is it ok to spam you from the index? Don't you need a subject?
  • Is it sent? When I submit the contact form on the index I get sent to the main contact form, but there's nothing telling me what happened. Did my message get sent?
  • Contact form validation. I only found out that 'email' is required after I submitted the form. Required fields should be marked as such so I don't have to go through the form twice. I left the field empty on the index page and it was fine there...
  • Networking infrastructure. The network infrastructure page will be meaningless to 99.9% of people. It needs text to explain what it is.
  • Developers area. The developer's section is essentially an "under construction" page. It's better not to have the link in the menu than have unfinished content on your site.
On a personal note, I hate it when people put things like "I also enjoy going to the gym, cycling, watching movies and going out for dinner." in their "About Me" text. Everyone likes those things. It says nothing about you.
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jaoudestudios
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Re: JaoudeStudios release v4.2 :: opinions please...

Post by jaoudestudios »

Thanks for the honesty onion2k , I do appreciate it.

I am going to go through your list this weekend :)
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Re: JaoudeStudios release v4.2 :: opinions please...

Post by JAB Creations »

First and foremost it looks sharp!

I like the search drop down, but add an id to the search text field and give it focus with JavaScript onmouseover to make it easier overall.

Good use of semantic headers. Only one h1 element, and good use of h2 elements.

XHTML 1.0 Strict, are you serving it as application/xhtml+xml locally? If so that will dramatically help you write better JavaScript as well as pinpoint XML parse errors. Someone here on the forums blew an entire day because of missing quote. You stand to gain a lot from using that mime. :wink:

Not WAI AAA compliant...
http://www.cynthiasays.com/mynewtester/ ... ios.com%2F

Time to install Chris Pederick's Web Developer toolbar. :wink: You can get WAI AAA compliance on your site with only a slight increase in XHTML coding practices and it's worth the boast. :twisted:

The RSS feed icons are too dark, with that color scheme using the normal colored RSS icons agreed by Mozilla and Microsoft would be good or if you want to style them do something other then a really dark rich color.

Where is the menu's :focus support?

Throw in some CSS 2.1 positioning and move the menu below the content. After disabling the style sheet it appears above the content.

Use CSS 2.1 positioning to move the #footer to the bottom: 0px; so the page visually renders with consistent positioning.

Drop-down menus wouldn't hurt and would reduce page navigation and reduce frustration for people who frequently visit your site.

The developers "page" is kind of useless...land visitors on one of the developer sub-menu pages.

Why not arrange the menu alphabetically? With positioning you can still arrange the code's order of anchors if you desire.

Increasing your blog's font-size wouldn't hurt though at least it's not set to 7px.

Over all it looks pretty good and most of my criticisms should be easy to implement if you decide to do so. :)
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