I'm wondering...are there any people serious into web design over here? There's got to be.
Oh, you are? Oh, good! Well, could you do me a favor? No, it's not going to hurt. What I need is some critiquing for something I've started up as a project. URL? Why, soitenly!
http://www.ladyinterference.com/webrings/tour/
Clicking as we speak? Good. Hey listen, I'm aware that at least one page (the "contact us" page) is totally offline at the mo, but that's a problem I'm working to rectify as soon as I have the time to do so. Hating the graphics? Well, I absolutely SUCK at graphics. I am so VERY bad. Everything else good? God, I hope so.
Here's to looking at unbiased commentary and constructive criticism.
(De-jeopardized Ben's post and reinstated the normal time line - personal preference thing I do to make posts more legible. For more information please go to http://www.perlfaq.com/faqs/id/131)
I have to agree whole heartedly with Ben. I have been working part time as a professional web designer for three years and unless absolutely needed, frames just eat up bandwidth. I always design under the theory that I want the page to be seen by as many people as possible. Frame incompatibility, inconsistencies between browsers and poor viewability under extremely high/low resolution situations are a few problems. You seem to have the resolution thing down - it displayed nicely in 640x480 except for the fact that the frame bars took up so much space.
Now, if you insist on having frames, why three? The top and bottom frames seem silly. Do one or the other. I would suggest combining the top and bottom bars at the top of the page. It will improve load time on the page.
The background graphics, IMO, are garish, at least in Netscape 4.51. The yellow and teal (or what Netscape dithers them to)look horrendous together, particularly because it's a background. At least it is a .gif. :) I'd turn them to black and white if you are going to keep that as a background and fade it so it was softer and less distracting. As it is, you can barely read the words.
I would also change your font. Arial Narrow looks really good but there is a really big chance that people wont be able to see it. Supply a default font in your html tags and you can at least attempt to control what the user sees.
I really dislike the navigation bar graphics/tables. First, the background color for the tables is not one of the "browser safe" colors so there is no guarantee that everyone sees the color you want them to see. For more info on this, go to http://www.lynda.com/hex.html.
In my 1024x768 pixel world, I can barely make out the words in the graphic at the top of the page. And the cover graphic with the flash glare is too fuzzy as well.
The page has a lot of potential. I think the biggest problems you have are with the graphics and the frames. If you have any graphics/stylistic questions, I would go to www.webpagesthatsuck.com. It shows you basically what not to do. Your page is better than most that show up there but they can help you fine tune it.
i don't reckon it matters much if people don't have the font, so long as you don't make it really really tiny so it's unreadable in times new roman.
oh that's a load of bullshit, imho. even some of the supposed "safe" colours dither in IE on my computer, for some reason. plus, there aren't enough colours in the 216 that look decent together, unless you go for black white and grey.
that page's message would be a lot more potent if the page didn't suck horribly itself. i hate that ugly picture of, presumably, himself at the top. it's creepy having someone staring at you from the top of every damn page. is that supposed to be an example of bad design? i don't know, but i sure hope so.
Well, from having worked as a designer, one of the biggest principles that _most_ employers push is consistency. They want everyone in the world to see the exact same thing, no matter what the browser. So this is something I look for in a _good_ web page. Granted, this is not a professional page, but as a back up, I always specify default fonts so I still retain more control over what font the browser displays. In this instance, she was obviously going for the non serif look of Arial Narrow. Now, if the user doesn't have Arial Narrow, they will default to Times New Roman, a serif font. I would suggest putting Arial as a default because most users have it and it still preserves the look she was going for - only slightly different. It's a stylistic suggestion, not an absolute.
I only suggested this because I took a look at the page source (IMO you can't rate a web site at all without looking at the source) and she is using a non-safe grey. "Safe" greys look quite nice, as you also noted, so that would probably be a better choice.
I believe IE changed the safe color set and that is why it often causes problems. Now granted, if you have a picture, you cannot use safe colors but for graphics, it can be easily achieved with subtle tweaking in Photoshop. There are plenty of other people who could explain the whole thing better than I can... I just looked on google.
I don't think their page sucks - it's just kind of bland. I don't care for the design or colors myself but they provide many useful links on a variety of topics that can help.
yeah, i was just giving my opinion. though most people would have arial narrow, wouldn't they? i define fonts in a stylesheet, because i'm lazy and don't care about fonts. i am currently using "lucida console", "courier new", monospace, or something along those lines.
of course. you find all sorts of interesting things in people's source codes, like that they use extra body tags instead of font tags, or something equally stupid.
i usually stick with greys anyway, but it's a pain if you're trying to use colours.
On Fri, 15 Sep 2000 03:30:07 GMT, Lady Interference wrote:
Ok...a little advice per your request.
I'm from the "no splash page" camp, so I'd have to say to ditch that. But considering you've got one on all your other pages I somehow doubt you'll take that advice ;) I'm also against frames - they make it difficult to bookmark sub pages, search engines don't always handle frames properly, I like to have as much of the screen dedicated to information as possible rather than navigation. But again that's a choice you have to make (it ain't my web page after all).
You might want to soften the background and make it more tile-able - it currently makes the text hard to read. The "Let Pop Trash Flow Webring" graphic is a little difficult to read as well - you may want to sharpen the "Pop" and "Trash" parts a bit. Or they might be artifacts of the compression you're using - if so, perhaps compress it less? It also looks like you need to change your .htaccess file - the error message indicates that your 404 page is missing too.