hclear — Tue, 18 Mar 2003 17:16:23 +0000

Ok, well thanks for your ideas guys and yeah i am on the road to recovery, i did post a site for review earlier on, a former verison of this so not strictly true...sorry about that..anyway, any criticism is good, because it gives me a focus for improvment, i'm no expert as you can all see, so thanks for the tips, and a new verison will be present soon.cheers

DaveyBoy — Tue, 18 Mar 2003 15:44:58 +0000

Yeah very true, i remember when I first started in about 1999 and everything I heard was negative, like 'man those colours don't look good together' etc. and it does kinda hurt cos I was so proud of what I had done. Another difficulty with critiquing is that everyone's taste is different, and no two designers are alike - we all like and dislike certain things and have our own ways of presenting information - thats why I think everyone should say which part of the site they actually want reviewing - the site as a whole? the navigation? the colour scheme? etc. so that they don't start getting bad reviews on things that they really think are good. I mean, who are we to say what is or isn't good at the end of the day?

Megan — Tue, 18 Mar 2003 15:21:20 +0000

It's not neccessarily wrapping them in cotton wool, it's more a matter of not being too discouraging. It seems to me that maybe we were a little too hard on hclear here, since s/he has removed the site now. It could be discouraging to receive a lot of harsh criticism right off the bat so I often tend to go a little easier on people who are new at this. Beginners need to focus on different aspects of a site than people who have more experience. I think it's best to target what that particular designer really needs to work on at this stage in his/her work. Start working on the basics, then move on to the finer details. Being too harsh at first could scare them away from web designing altogether.

Of course, this all varies from person to person, which what makes critiquing difficult sometimes. Some new people will want to hear the brutal honesty, while some experienced designers can't handle criticism well at all.

DaveyBoy — Tue, 18 Mar 2003 15:07:18 +0000

Quote: P.S. You should have told us this was your first site - I've seen your name around here before and kind of assumed that you must have posted a site for review at some point! Sorry if we're being to hard on you here - we don't mean to.

There's no point in being liberal and wrapping new designers in cotton wool, it doesn't help if you say that the site is 'flawless' or anything really. I think everything you've said it very helpful to someone just starting out and just be taken as advice, not criticism. Its more of a 'if you did this and that, it would be better...' and that isn't a bad thing in my eyes!

Megan — Tue, 18 Mar 2003 14:33:56 +0000

Just to add to that - I think it's really important to start a site with a really good architecture - that means the plan of all your sections and how they relate to each other. YOu can always add more later but it helps to have a solid structure from teh start. This means that you need to have a good idea of what you're going to include on the site - a clear plan of what you're going to do. Think of it of a hierarchy - like a family tree. You'll have one page at the top (the home page), with several sections extending from that, and pages extending from those sections and so on. Even if you don't fill up all your content right away, you can still create the base html pages and folders to contain them. You can also reserve a place for them on the navbar.

Speaking of the navbar, I also think it's important to keep your administrivia separte from your real content. This is a very common mistake that needs to be addressed. When you mix administrivia* with real content you just water down your content. People look at your navbar, see mainly a bunch of links that aren't relevant to them, assume you don't have much content that interests them, and go someplace else.

** by "administrivia" I mean stuff that is just about the site itself - links, affiliate stuff, advertising info, possibly "about us" and things like that. People largely don't care about these things, it isn't why they're visiting, so keep it out of their way. On smaller sites it may be okay to mix these in one navbar, but when you have more than five or so links it's best to separate them out into categories. You can even just put a space between each set on the navbar to visually indicate that they're two separate groups.

P.S. You should have told us this was your first site - I've seen your name around here before and kind of assumed that you must have posted a site for review at some point! Sorry if we're being to hard on you here - we don't mean to.

Megan — Tue, 18 Mar 2003 14:17:35 +0000

IMO, now is the time to rethink this thing rather than later. If you restart now you'll save a lot more problems down the road.

hclear — Tue, 18 Mar 2003 08:54:25 +0000

ok, wow take it easy on me,first of all, it is my first site. second of all as it clearly states - "The site is still currently under construction and new resources are being added all the time" so this isnt it, more content is on its way, and thirdly thankyou for your opinions, its very useful to get some quality user feedback, a complete redesign?!!! i only just put this one up, not too sure about that but thanks anyway. Well, i'll see what i can do in the way of changes, and get back to you soon, thanks guys and gals, see ya soon.

Jimmy Changa — Mon, 17 Mar 2003 23:12:23 +0000

I would really love to have comments, but all I get is "access Denied"....dam proxy servers.

lol

taff — Mon, 17 Mar 2003 22:26:13 +0000

You're *all* right on the Flash nav, even Davey Sure its kinda *neat* in a novelty sort of way but it is also horribly impractical for all the resons listed above and more...

1/ I personally like to be able to glance down at the status bar to see where a link is going to. Is it an external site? a pdf document? a mailto link? All out of place in the core navigation of a site I know but that doesn't stop some people.

2/ I also like to have the option of opening a link inot a new window via rightclick or shift/click - flash menus rob me of that as well.

DaveyBoy — Mon, 17 Mar 2003 18:14:02 +0000

Well i'm still liking the flash, maybe you're both right in that its out of place on this site, there's just something about the way it looks when you drag down vertically over the buttons i like.

I actually would suggest a complete overhaul/redesign of the site - and work out exactly what needs to go where and from what pages it will be available from. Planning is just as important as design