mfdc — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 13:40:06 +0000

You'll have to excuse me if this has been posted previously, I just wanted to add something to my comment a while back......HAVE YOU READ THAT INTRODUCTION PARAGRAPH!!!???? C'mon, it means nothing. Even when you know what it means, it STILL means nothing! Theres a program called 'business speak generator' that you can download & it generates paragraphs of meaningless text like this! A sort of, lorem Ipsum for business's. No offence, but you really need to simply what Energy culture is about & in my opinion, that paragraph does absolutley nothing!

Abhishek Reddy — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 12:55:39 +0000

True, some of the people pictures aren't ideal, but I think it's a nice touch not using CD stock characters.

The colours are fine.

The menu doesn't do it for me at all. I can't tell the structure of the site from it. The page names aren't obvious, and there's nothing familiar about it. In fact, when I saw it initially, I thought everything in the side bar was links to individual documents (like maybe .pdf -- certainly not web pages). I couldn't really find my way around, such that I still can't tell just what this company is.

On that note, add some keywords to the title. "Energy Culture" at first sounded like some alternative energy source or energy-smart lifestyle movement. Then seeing the Parthenon threw me off completely, confusing me more.

Actually, throw in keywords in the main copy itself. Presently, it's just corporate babble about innovation, systems, strategy. What exactly does this company do? Human resources? You could also add blurbs under keyword headings. Like "Strategic Cultural Alignment Processes / we do xyz to achieve abc with regards to...", and even link from there to an interior page.

Ah, before I go off rambling in a path of infinite tangents, I'd better cut this post short. I hope that was somewhat useful.

syawilim — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 13:14:19 +0000

Hi All, well I’ve finally gotten around to responding to all of your feedback. Where to start?
• The Parthenon – originally the client was using this as metaphor (according to them cultural change is built upon 7 pillars). It was only recently that they realised the Parthenon actually has 8, but they wanted to keep it.
• The images – I was provided a whole bunch of images to choose from, but when it came down to it I was voted down because the people in the images that have been used are those that have supported their business to-date.
• The copy – I couldn’t tell you how many times this has been changed and it is now about 1/8 of what it started out as.
• The colours – these align closely to the clients business cards, letterheads etc. but I will look at the menu contrast for sure.
• Body text – someone has said it looks like filler text. Any suggestions, font, size?
And I've got to say this has got to be the best forum I've come across, always good, productive posts.

xavierj — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 03:16:35 +0000

The text is very very small and there's enough of it to scare a potential client away from reading through it. If you can't change the size try double spacing??

I'm seeing "people performance" everywhere and again someone's mentioned that it's not obvious what they're selling.

The "Our Focus.." graphic at top right looks a little out of place. You wouldn't see a prominent headline on the New York Times split into two lines and right aligned.

Pictures aren't bad, but nobody's looking at the camera, not one. Every single person seems preoccupied. At least the home page could show someone in a photo interested in the *site visitor*???

Parthenon, photos and "Energy Culture" don't tie in together at all. I dont get it.

KarenArt — Fri, 10 Sep 2004 13:46:11 +0000

Well, I think Megan's already hit on everything (including things I didn't catch) so you can't go wrong with that advice.

Just wanted to add my congratulations on the adoption as well!
I hope you'll stop by the Chat forum when you get back and maybe post a picture for us.

Megan — Fri, 10 Sep 2004 13:33:30 +0000

syawilim wrote: Thanks for all your feedback, sorry not to have replied sooner but I am currently in Ethiopia to collect a little boy my wife and I have just adopted.

Wow, syawilim! That must be so exciting! Congratulations on your adoption!

This site looks okay but I do find a few problems that I think could be easily corrected. Firstly, I agree with others about the photos. The parthenon one is confusing and the one of the two women is really poor quality in comparison. When using several images in a collage it's important to get similar quality images and similar tones & lighting. You can try to fake this by adjusting the levels on the two women. Some of the photos on other pages look better but the contrast between professional parthenon photo and amateur snapshots is still really glaring.

I agree with Karen about the text. That looks like automatically generated filler text (Dreamweaver has some plugins that do text in various jargon).

The thrid problem I have is with the navbar. The grey text on beige background doesn't look very good, and may be hard to read for a lot of people*. I would make those links white, and increase the font size a little bit. There's enough room for that last item to span over two lines.

I'm having some problems with the bottom footer. When I mouseover any area there I get a black underline on all of the text in that section (I'm using Opera 7.5 if that helps). It's hard to know which are separate links in that section.

I'm surprised I haven't mentioned this yet - the logo isn't that great. Not really a logo, just the busines sname in plain text. Something more eye catching is needed here.

Speaking of eye catching, I'm finding this design to be very nice but not all that exciting. It doesn't seem to go with the "energy culture" brand. Bright colours and more active graphics would be a better choice.

*footnote - I was just talking to my mom about tiny text and people over 40 (you know, my usual lecture. When you get to be a certain age your eyesight starts to go and it gets hard to read things.) She pointed out that low contrast text is also a big problem. So, not only is it important to make your text a decent size, it is also important to make it stand out enough from the background.

AyntRyte — Thu, 09 Sep 2004 15:35:17 +0000

For me, the parthenon steals from the elegance of the design. Not the parthenon itself, but a picture of one. I think this would work better as a graphic or logo.

Replace the fixed font sizes with percentages, starting with 100% for the body text - it won't break the design

syawilim — Thu, 09 Sep 2004 11:39:56 +0000

Thanks for all your feedback, sorry not to have replied sooner but I am currently in Ethiopia to collect a little boy my wife and I have just adopted.
As I said this site was a real experience, the copy was all put together by the clients and we are on about the sixth draft, the images….the clients…..everything else me.
Will respond further when I get home….internet access very expensive.

heebiejeebieclu — Tue, 07 Sep 2004 18:30:37 +0000

Waht's ur overall mark out of 10 everybody?

y0re — Tue, 07 Sep 2004 17:58:38 +0000

* colour scheme:great, i like it very much
* common design principles (alignment, white space, visual organization etc.) respected
* common design mistakes:don't see one
* usability:very good
* appropriateness:don't know
* browser compatibility:very good
* resolutionnice
* function of widgets/dhtml/forms, et cetera:good
* image compression:good
* information architecture:excellent
* consistency:very good, i'm impressed
* coding/validation:good
* use of technologies:i prefer only html and css for layout , but tables are still ok
in conclusion i like the site .there are some pages where text areas could delimited somehow..
valentin