skirrow — Sat, 27 May 2000 17:49:00 +0000

Hi,
Thanks for your comments.

You said:
"One question - how come one of your major design is for a site that offers practically exactly the same things as your site?"
What do you mean? We did a web design job for 1st Connection. If that's what you mean?

If I put some buttons in the design that did the forward and back would that make up for the lack of top bar?

Neil

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anat — Sat, 27 May 2000 17:22:00 +0000

Nice looking site, though I do agree with the comments made here - it need more spacing for the text and mouseovers for the links.
Other than that, IMO the text color is not dark enough. I prefer more contrast when reading against white background.
The hosting packages look good but it's hard to tell how good they really are without trying out the customer service.
One question - how come one of your major design is for a site that offers practically exactly the same things as your site?
I'm editing to add this last thing - I find the pop-up window to be annoying because it makes my browser's navigation bar disappear. I'm not sure how many people think about opening the menu with a right click on the background. I'm afraid many just close the window altogether.
oh and good luck!

[This message has been edited by anat (edited 27 May 2000).]

skirrow — Wed, 24 May 2000 17:08:00 +0000

Hi,
Thanks for all your comments. I'll play around with the design and layout a bit and post here again when it's changed!

Cheers
Neil

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Justin S — Wed, 24 May 2000 15:48:00 +0000

Man, I got that kind of reputation, eh?

1) Although sometimes sites in pop-up boxes look good, for a hosting company it doesn't work. I don't see any reason why it needs to be in a pop-up box either.

2) You can make the right menu with the news a little wider, and also connect it to the top menu bar.

3) The text is just put there, and it doesn't look to good. Maybe indent each paragraph or something. Or maybe make the first word bold.

4) Make the logo a little more artistic. Maybe add a glass effect or something to the text. You can also make the logo a little wider. What's up with the person? Weird...

Not bad...

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Megan — Wed, 24 May 2000 14:25:00 +0000

Well, pop-up windows are almost always annoying. I think that it's important to allow the user to have some control over what's happening on their computer. It gets really annoying when you're already running 4 or 5 browser windows (like I am now)

Your site is providing a service. The most important thing, therefore, is functionality. Tricks like this can work with artistic sites, but not for something like this. If you really have to have a lot of control over your layout, just use a fixed width layout.

Speaking of functioinality, you're probably going to want to have more on here for tech support and stuff like that.

Some of the text on here is really small - especially the stuff on the side. It's too small for me to read on Windows - it would be totally illegible on a Mac or Linux machine. I also agree with vy that there is too much text crammed into here.

Your main content should be separated into short paragraphs (do some readong on writing for the web - it's harder for people to read from a screen, so you have to keep things short and divide it up into short paragraphs and lists to make it easier). You should also add a little more padding to your table, so the text is a little further from the edge. More spacing is needed basically everywhere - the hosting page is bad for that too. You might want to add a submenu on there to organize and highlight the other solutions you offer.

Your design portfolio should have actual links to the sites you've done. Same with the clients sites. YOu can use CSS to define different classes of links, so the nav links can be white and the rest of the links a different colour. You should probably expect high end users who have 4.0 browsers, so don't worry about backward compatibility.

Otherwise, I think the design looks really nice. You might want to add a blue bar along the bottom, with the copyright statement on it, just to add a little more structure. I think the colour scheme is fine. An accent colour could work to highlight your logo or something, but it looks fine as it is.

skirrow — Wed, 24 May 2000 13:11:00 +0000

Hi,
I rarely read these forums. But I guess you mean this Justin guy hates pop-up windows!

I wasn't sure. But I decided it allowed me to control the layout a lot better so I went for it!
Their is always the link in the bottom left to open it in the main window!

I know what you mean about the links. Maybe I could make all the links that are in the main text bold. But I'll leave the ones in the top bar. Do you think that would help?

Where do you think I should add some colour? And what colours?

Cheers
Neil

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vy22 — Wed, 24 May 2000 11:51:00 +0000

Ok Skirrow first of all, Why on earth have you got the whole site in a pop up box? When Justin sees that entry page he's gonna flip his lid!. I would suggest putting the contents of that pop up as your first page and maybe adding one more colour to the site. The site kind of gave me the impression that you where trying to cram as much text into a pop up box as possible.

Also I would probably make the links a bit more revealing, either by a mouseover or a bolder text.

Thats all I can think of now!

~Vy~