Keegan — Sat, 01 Sep 2001 02:38:45 +0000

This might help to motivate you wanting to get rid of that large Maroon area. The body of your site is well done, I like it. The head and the left side need work. I spent some time trying to put that into perspective with the rest of your content here.

The psd is waiting for you if you venture into Photoshop.
Throw me an e-mail

I hope that I helped.

Edit: added the second and third

Thanks!

valkaryn — Tue, 28 Aug 2001 16:40:30 +0000

Megan,

Thanks for your excellent feedback. I actually have been waiting for break in my schedule to address the "large red block" issue. I am busy writing tools to put on the site and writing custom programs for clients. You know what they say "the cobblers family is shoeless and the shrinks wife is crazy!".

Thanks again.

taff — Tue, 28 Aug 2001 16:38:46 +0000

I like the colour scheme. I'm not sure that I like the maroon text though. Perhaps revert it to back with maroon as the link colour?

Eliminating the top and left margins (at least) would make things look a lot better.

I'm not sure what the graphic "thingy" is down the left but it is not consistent page to page and actually gets squeezed out on some pages in 800x600.

Your navigation bar is inconsistent - very disconcerting. Took me a few minutes to figure out whar was happening. At one point, "Training" is there twice.

Overall, pretty nice for a "network geek"

The Webmistress — Tue, 28 Aug 2001 16:38:15 +0000

Welcome valkaryn,

I quite like the overall look & colour scheme. A couple of things I would change though :

Set the page margins to 0 so that the top & sides meet the browser chrome.

Loose the drop shadow as I personally think it just makes things blurry.

Make the top box smaller & make the logo more unique - incorporating the 'Better Networks. Better Systems. Better Programming. Better Service' - it really doesn't stand out enough at the moment.

The sub pages need to have the logo on it then have the heading.

The navigation needs to be the same on each page and have links from pages that are extra if need be, but keep a consistent look throughout. I would move it up into the box at the top and perhaps have the text changing colour.

Look forward to reading your views on some of the other sites that have posted for a critique. A fresh pair of eyes on a site are always appreciated and it's a great way of picking up new ideas as well

Megan — Tue, 28 Aug 2001 16:32:29 +0000

Hey, valkaryn - welcome to TWF! I hope you enjoy participating here.

I am very impressed with your site. I really like the colours you've chosen and the layout is overall very good. I do find that the red block at the top with the logo and everything is a little on the large side. I would like to see a more distinctive logo there as well. And the drop shadows on both of those are way too big.

Another thing to do is to add some sort of mouseovers to the navigation menu - I find that mouseovers really help both from a usability perspective and an aesthetic perspective.

I really like the way you've done the content sections there with the long columns. It looks really good (except for the oversized drop shadows on the photos )