Education Feedback on website design

Hey everyone, I've been asked to try and collect some feedback for a friends new website, which they have been designing to help publicize a charity event they are setting up.

If anyone has a couple of minutes, could you go to www.biglittlemarket.co.uk and let me know what you think so I can pass it on?

I've been told to stress that brutal honesty will be appreciated, as she is considering a career in graphic design and wants to improve fast.

 

The menu isn't immediately obvious. I only clicked on it because an orange outline looked like a CSS bug.

Other than that looks alright. Oh maybe the font change the font.

 

She would be better off getting a wordpress theme and customizing it to her needs...

The menu icon isn't clearly displayed obviously the icon is missing and allot of people would miss the menu. The footer social links aren't very visible.

Not allot to say really =/ just tell her to use wordpress and get a free theme obviously wanting a career in graphic design would benefit her using wordpress because she can still create the images and so on and wouldn't have to deal with all the code...

 

I hope you meant that as i'm trying to be constructive here, albeit direct.

Only looked at it on phone but sorry to say the style is quite pedestrian and samey. It's functional but not attention grabbing and has no consistent style.
A wordpress theme would offer a lot more polish for minimal effort and steer them to a decent structure for the individual pages.

The logo image, wooden box thing needs a lot of work. It's too simple and the fonts/headers clash with it. No encompassing style is evident. You have simple illustrations with photos of people and photos of objects.

If interested in the graphical design field, explore Instagram for illustrations, take a certitec course in adobe illustrator, browse big stock for ideas tagged with things like charity as alternatives to the images.


The copy and the imagery need to line up more cleanly. The imagery telling the same story as, or providing a visual cue to read, the copy. Not sure it does now. Look at the charity page and what is the sign saying 'charity' there for. If I scroll that far it tells me nothing. Put it at the top as a notice of what the page is about. Better, replace it at the top with something that conveys a call to action or calls to mind when you would expect people to be supportive of charity.

About us: should talk to why they are doing it and try to share a vision or belief with the reader. At the moment it reduces confidence, it's too meek. Be bold and dont do yourself down!

That's off the cuff. Hope it's taken in the intended spirit and that it doesn't read too harsh.

 

That's either a massive needle or a really small carrot stuck into the top of that sign.

Other than that it looks OKish to my eyes, a little overly simple maybe, reminescent of stripped down websites that get foisted onto mobile devices if you forget to tick 'use desktop mode'

 

Firstly I apologise in advance for the negativity that may come across in this post, I'll try to be constructive with suggestions at the same time.

I like that your friend has tried to keep the design fairly simple and clean looking, they just need to sort out some of the features really and tidy up the design some more.


1) I hate the menu button - like others, I didn't realise it was a button until I hovered over it and got the icon to show up.

2) I really dislike how the menu takes over the entire screen when you click the button, with the very few options available it may as well be removed altogether and traded for a static menu.

3) The background image adds nothing to the website as it's hidden behind the main content block, may as well remove it.

4) The social media icons in that little box above the content may as well be removed if there are also going to be bigger and more readable versions of them in the footer for the website.

5) The theme seems somewhat unresponsive, when you click on a menu item it takes a couple of seconds for the page to load. - I think this is possibly due to the JavaScript being used... this is another reason to do-away with that menu style altogether as people looking for information won't want to wait.


Judging by the source code, it was done by a site builder application provided by a website host (which to me is a big no-no for someone trying to progress in a graphic design field).

If your friend is going to use one of those, then I'd have to agree with others and suggest that your friend does their site using a Wordpress or similar blog site theme.

 

Hmm...

Site title bar/text needs to be centralised and maybe made into a nicer logo.

Duplication of the site title immediately below it in the main text.

The menu needs to be put in the header bar, which needs to be larger.

The header bar only displays as a short purple strip in Chrome ( 1/3 of the width of the text & is aligned right, but displays as a long strip that doesn't stretch all the way to the left of the main text body in IE and Opera- there is a small gap on the left.

The cartoony picture is honestly dreadful, reminds me of something we used to make back in the 90s in IT classes at secondary school using MS Paint ( also doesn't work well as a background image ). I'd go for either a stock image, or a well designed logo- something more professional looking that conveys the nature of the people behind the website/project.

The cartoony picture doesn't need to be a clickable link that pops up a slightly larger version.

Twitter & FB links don't need to be repeated at the bottom of the site- icons would be fine in a footer bar, the written links just look untidy.

I would agree about using a wordpress template, even the free ones can be very classy yet simple.

 

check out square space, its great for making websites and has some pretty good designs, should be easy to find a discount code as well

 

Thanks for all of the feedback and I'm planning on passing it on tomorrow, so if anyone has forgotten something or hesitating please feel free to add your comments.

 

If they go down the wordpress route lake a look at themeforest for theme options.

 

the font used it terrible, find a font that is clean and simple. not one that has accents on the letters (not sure of the correct termology)

 

The website host is called FastHost, but I think it has a lot of similar feature to Wordpress (template based website designer, web store bundled in, etc). Having another look at different tempate might be a good call though.

What do people think of the color scheme? Personally I don't like it, but I am aware that that is personal opinion.

 

Serif.

Apart from perhaps the body text body text, I thought the choice of h1 and h4 fonts were one of the best things about it personally.

But yeah, most things are going WordPress although you can still find most of the themes avaliable on somewhere like themeforest as HTML/CSS if she wanted to edit/customise them that way (both ways have their own merits).

Look for a responsive template if possible - I haven't tried her site on a mobile device but responsive sites work nicely on both and seem to be en vogue at the moment.

 

If your friend is using a hosting package from Fasthosts then they should have an option to install WordPress on their hosted website using their one-click installer:
https://help.fasthosts.co.uk/app/an...alling-wordpress-using-the-oneclick-installer

As for the colour-scheme, I'm okay with the abundance of white on the page as I have a colour vision deficiency, so having things on a white background makes it easier for my corrective lenses to process colours of objects/text into something I can see more clearly.
I guess the main background of the website could possibly be made a different colour with the main content boxes being left white so that the message stands out a bit more.