strobe — Sun, 25 Jan 2004 17:40:02 +0000

The site looks very nice, and the different themes for each page is a nice touch. My concern though, is for your users coming in via dial-up. It may a slow visit for them, because they would have to pull all of the graphics back down after each visit.

Also, you really need a domain name. You've spent a lot of time on the site, but you'll end up cutting yourself short if you just use an IP address, because a lot of people won't be able to remember than, or even understand what it is.

Overall, the site looks very professional though, and the themes blend together nicely.

amrod — Thu, 22 Jan 2004 02:12:39 +0000

ok, i might suggest that you dont make all the other pages differ from the home page or the other way around. it seems to change to much.

taff — Sat, 10 Jan 2004 00:35:28 +0000

I like the colour per page concept and especially the fact that they all flow from the stained glass. Unfortunately, I think that this comes off as a little strong. What might work better, imo is to use a consistent colour as a "base" - likely the blue of the cross/logo - and accent the scheme with each of the different colours

Busy — Fri, 09 Jan 2004 22:32:46 +0000

you need to use width and height on all your images, a little jumpy while loading on dialup (I did notice you said you will add them later).

Only thing that I can pick out is the top banner name being to low, looks kind of misplaced or cut off.
Maybe make the index banner same height as all the other pages and use coloured link boxs (link background colour same as the pages colour) so it blends a little since you cant have same colour throughout.

How internet savey would the people of the church be? would they know about underlineless links ? some links have underline on hover, some dont, and you also have images as well, could get confusing for the older or unknowledgable folk. as a helpful bonus could use title="link description" or title="click me i'm a link" on each link.

does look good, doesnt make me want to go to church but does make me feel watched.

mairving — Fri, 09 Jan 2004 17:29:35 +0000

One thing bad about Opera is it's cached images. I dumped the cache but it still showed the same old images. I told it not to cache images and it still showed the old images. Finally I added height and width the image and that fixed the Opera spacing problem.

mairving — Fri, 09 Jan 2004 16:27:41 +0000

Grrr, I looked at the code to fix the Opera bug. It looks like the problem is when the designer save the corners, one was saved at 35x37 but the others were saved as 37x37, 38x37 and 39x37, which causes the break. I will standardize and fix them.

mairving — Fri, 09 Jan 2004 14:52:18 +0000

Megan wrote: Overall this looks really good. I've noticed a few things though.

I agree with Suzanne about the typography. Those smaller graphics on the left side of the home page are a problem. The alignment is often off and even the spacing between the three images isn't even.

I didn't spend a lot of time with those images. Normally I would use rows and cells to space them properly but in this case they have to be in one cell because of the background hand image to display properly. I can space them equally even though they will probably change.

Megan wrote:
In Opera the upper right white curve doesn't line up with the box below it. There's a little jag there where they meet. That happens on every page except the home page. I also think it looks odd on the home page where the two curves meet at the bottom. Might be better just to straighten that out.

Hmm, I tested it in Opera and Mozilla and then changed the top header a little to add some more white space. I didn't test it after that. Mozilla it stills shows fine but Opera has the spacing problem. Should be easily fixed. Thanks for the heads up.

Megan wrote:
Page titles should say more than one word. Remember that this is important for search engines, so putting something more about who the page belongs to and what it's about would be helpful both for your rankings and SE users.

I am not worried about page titles at this stage of the game. They will be more descriptive but that will be near the final stages.

Megan wrote:
The idea of changing colours from page to page is really nice and adds a lot of dimension to the site. However, this is something that should be abandoned if it causes a serious problem for loading times. A site like this should probably be as accessible as possible. In that regard, the page text is very small and will probably be hard to read for a lot of people. I would imageine that the older crowd would be an important part of the target audience, so font size and adjustibility is an important thing to keep in mind.

I don't know if I have much of a choice on the graphics changing from page to page. I initially suggested using the same header and colors from page to page but that idea was rejected. I will make the text easier on the eyes for my elders. Any suggestions on that would be appreciated.

Thanks for the suggestions, help and comments.

Megan — Fri, 09 Jan 2004 14:32:23 +0000

Overall this looks really good. I've noticed a few things though.

I agree with Suzanne about the typography. Those smaller graphics on the left side of the home page are a problem. The alignment is often off and even the spacing between the three images isn't even.

In Opera the upper right white curve doesn't line up with the box below it. There's a little jag there where they meet. That happens on every page except the home page. I also think it looks odd on the home page where the two curves meet at the bottom. Might be better just to straighten that out.

Page titles should say more than one word. Remember that this is important for search engines, so putting something more about who the page belongs to and what it's about would be helpful both for your rankings and SE users.

The idea of changing colours from page to page is really nice and adds a lot of dimension to the site. However, this is something that should be abandoned if it causes a serious problem for loading times. A site like this should probably be as accessible as possible. In that regard, the page text is very small and will probably be hard to read for a lot of people. I would imageine that the older crowd would be an important part of the target audience, so font size and adjustibility is an important thing to keep in mind.

mairving — Fri, 09 Jan 2004 13:42:24 +0000

Thanks, WM. Yeah, I will look at changing the yellow on the events page. The problem is that the designer sent me psd's for all of the pages but they were flattened so I can't easily change the color. I will see if I can get the layered version to do so.

As a general rule, I don't like it when I click on a page and the nav's are in different places on the next page which is what happens on the home page. The design of the home page also makes it slower loading than the sub-pages which the goal is always to make the home page load as fast as possible. I do doubt if I will be able to convince them to change the home page from it current look to the look of the secondaries though.

Thanks.

The Webmistress — Fri, 09 Jan 2004 08:52:08 +0000

I like it! The only thing I really have to say is that I don't particularly like the colour for the 'events' page as it seems really washed out compared to all the other vibrant colour choices. Plus I think it's odd that the header section is much higher on the index page compared to the other pages and I think the smaller headers are a better size, the bigger one makes the index page feel overpowering for some reason.