http://homepage.eircom.net/~technoworks/Index.htm I just need some constructive critisism. Is it too purple? too simple? to complicated ( ) ? etc.
Regarding the colour, it ain't exactly butch, but not unpleasant. The page is a strange width, somewhere around 1100 pixels? Which means that only about 20% of the people viewing the site will be able to do so without horizontal scrolling. I usually design pages to work at resolutions 800 x 600 and upwards, which means making the page 758 pixels wide, to allow for the vertical scroll bar. Personally I don't like using frames, they make it hard for people to bookmark specific pages within your site. In addition seacrh engines may point to a page within your site outside of a frameset, so people following the link will not see the navigation elements of the page, like this: http://homepage.eircom.net/~technoworks/Projects.htm There are work-arounds for both these problems, but it's less effort to avoid using frames in the first place. You could drop the text size a bit for the links on the left, also stick to using just a few fonts consistantly throughout the site, you appear to have 3 different fonts in the navigation area to the left of the page alone. You may also wish to consider using a sans-serif font, like Arial or Verdana, some studies indicate that these are easier to read on-screen, personally I think they look smarter too. Some Typography articles: http://desktoppub.about.com/library/weekly/aa100900b.htm http://www.redsun.com/type/ http://www.dreamink.com/dots/resources/012700-rules-typography.shtml
Basically, the same as webchimp pointed out about keeping a consistent font, decent font sizes and probably most important of the three: the page width. Lose the frames too. Learn some CSS, and position the nav with that, or tables if you really must. Lose that image at the top. It is really pointless to be honest. It is just text, you don't need an image. It just increases loading times. The "-Liquid K9" at the end of each post seems rather large compared with its importance. I mean, are there going to be any other authors posting on the page? I would just lose it altogether. You could put it next to the data and title eg. "Thursday 29-05-2003 - Site news (minor update) by Liquid K9". The colours are alright I suppose. But I think you could do better. Try Spin The Colour Wheel if you need ideas. Someone showed me that link before, it really is quite helpful.
as it has been a long time since I made a website (and that was using a template!) it was only a test. I'm currently designing a much better layed out version. Though it too has frames this time, the colour scheme is grey/silver/white. Still not brilliant, but at least not as feminine
Personally I'd lose the grey text and make it black. The text on the page should be easy to read and I think it might be a bit hard for some to read. I'd also recommend changing the font typeface to something like "verdana, arial, sans-serif". Changing from frames to tables is a good idea as it will be simpler for your readers to use the site over a frame. Other than the three above I like the colour scheme as it's easy on the eyes, especially if you lose the grey text and go black.
Welcome to the forums afraser2k - I remember you from my ocuk-forums days The thing that strikes me most is the font size, even on 1280*1024 it's biiiig Verdana/tahoma in 10pt is the usual for most websites these days. Use CSS.
I'm not too keen on the use of loads of different fonts. Maybe 2 at most, and if you use more than one don't have too many combinations of bold/italic in there. Hmmmm, I think the colour looks a little pale to be honest. Hope I helped
You should maybe have one font typeface for the whole site, with only slight variations for headings (size, colour, style, etc). The three font names I gave above should go into the section for naming the font you want to use. PS: Hi RTT.
thanks all. I'd like to explain the size of the text by saying that I use 1600x1200 res' but thats no excuse... Just back to why I used frames: I used them as a 'starting point'. so I get the different segments of the website correct, I would eventually paste the components into a main-page.
New Design I've uploaded the new design here its very, very, different from the original. It should be suitable for 800x600 and above. Also, no frames
only 'cause thats what Visual Studio.NET keeps setting the target schema to. I'll make a netscape (and other) compatable one later. after this one works.
I just removed the search bar I nicked off Amazon.com; it isnt as good looking but at least its not stolen I'll fix that later.
darken the colours a bit especiall for headings do a search for colour pickers on google i can c your website using mozilla 1.4b
Something's amiss, in Netscape 4.08 I see a page of HTML code, the browser doesn't render it at all. In Opera 7.11 I see <%@ Language="JScript" %> at the top of the page, so I guess this is the source of the problem. Also, bear in mind that unless you fix the font size, certain parts of the page and will be stretched to accomodate larger font sizes than you designed things to look best with, for example: It's also worth remembering that the Windows font size has an effect, even when using CSS to determine text size. I have windows set to use large fonts, so the top of the bit-tech home page looks like this: Notice the line wrap which is screwing up the table height and making a mess of the navigation bar.
Turns out that was the cause of most viewing problemes. Visual Studio seems to like things its way and no other (a microsoft product acting like that? no... I wont believe it ) I'm not sure what to do 'bout the text sizes, but I'll begin experiementing tomorrow (got me a 'Beginning ASP 3.0' book )
Basically, CSS will give you far greater control over text than you can achieve with plain ol' HTML. However, with regard to making sure things don't go screwy when people have their windows fonts set differently or the text set to different sizes in the browser, testing is the answer. When I develop a site I spend a fair while creating and testing a single page when I'm happy that everything is OK, I make copies for all the subsequent pages the site requires. If you want to ensure that text within a table cell remains on single line use the nowrap attribute, for example: <td width="10%" nowrap>Some text that you want to remain on one line.</td> ASP won't do anything for the layout and appearance of a site, it's a server side language.
