Constructive Critique required..

Tellox

Just finished what Im hoping to be the finished version of otecha.com (bar of course, the content, once my artist gets working)

Looking for critique on the general design... Have used phpnuke for my last site.. decided to try and actually do it myself this time. Programs used were notepad, photoshop, and dreamweaver(to point out all the ****ups I make in notepad)

Anybody running 800x600 or lower, hit "Low Resolution" at the side bar. Site is designed for 1024x768 and firefox. Yes I am aware that the banner cuts off hilariously in big boy resolutions.

And er...be brutal.

maxheadroom

Firstly, sort out the HTML validation:
http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A//www.otecha.com/

Once that's done, thnik about if you really want to squash all of your content into a tiny box in the middle of the page - you're not really utilizing the screen space available to you.

cosgrove80

The links on the navigation bar on the left should open in the current window rather than a new window each time.

mneylon

It's very slow to load. The background image is over 60k!

cleareyed

Sorry m8 but I think u got this ar*eways. The artwork is crap. It looks like 80's graffiti style. it looks old, not even retro. You seem to care more about the tech. if the design is right they will come. It is boring.:o

Tellox

the critisizm is appreciated, as always. Its how we learn, I suppose.

But one thing, I dont make sites 56k-friendly.

mneylon

Originally posted by Tellox

But one thing, I dont make sites 56k-friendly.

I'm on DSL and found it slow!

Tellox

loads instantly for me, and everyone else I've asked..

RobertFoster

I don't like the green and blue, but the red and grey are nice.

I think you maybe need a footer to close the page off.

The red is my favourite

dangerman

The grey box for the menu is huge; yet there's only 3 items in it - looks strange. I'm guessing you just haven't filled it up yet.

I don't like the jagged grey background lines/mixed with the green texture. Colour scheme just seems really dull/ugly to me. - Though that of course is subjective. It seems you're trying to create an exciting/modern/cool look, but I think the colours let you down, that grey smells of boredom and the big blank spaces of it just make the whole thing a bit bland.

Also, the cartoon character on the right looks badly anti-aliased/resized. Would look nicer imo if the edges were a bit cleaner. Running over its edges with the pen tool give it a nice clean black outline would sort it out i think.

I don't like links that force open new windows.

When I clicked on 'low resolution' it pops a new window up, leaving the standard version of the site sitting there - the low resolution one took long enough to load on my 512 dsl.

I think it's a bit of a blanket attack on a large percentage of potential visitors to say 'But one thing, I dont make sites 56k-friendly.' I just think it's a bit soon for that attitude. But of course its' up to you. I know it can be a pain designing for the 56k group, specially when you've gotten used to dsl yourself.

I tried to leave a comment on your news story, I don't think it worked correctly.

I'm really nitpicking now, but I don't think you need 'menu' and then a menu, and 'content' and then your content. Just seems a bit redundant. But i'm just bringing up anything I think of.

Please totally feel free to disregard what I've said, a lot of it was v. subjective. Good luck with the site.

cgarvey

I think the design is good, but is still lacking a small.. by that I mean I like the random colour/character thing, but its still a bit bare.

The idea of it only working for 1024x768 users who use a full screen browser with no side bars enable, is a bit limiting.

Michele is right .. it is very slow to load. Just now it took 5-7 seconds to load .. with 2-3 of those at least being the content iframe (for which you have 2 closing tags).

Finally the low-resolution is still forced very wide.. consider moving the menu along the top giving you a lot more usefull horizontal real estate.

If you are not 56k friendly, just make sure that your target audience aren't either.. even on 2Mb DSL I don't think I'd bother posting (if I were amongst the target audience) because of the speed.

.cg

hostyle

Originally posted by cleareyed
You seem to care more about the tech. if the design is right they will come.

Balls! Content is king. Design is just an afterthought - it obviously helps but its not necessary. Having said that, bad design is worse than no design.

hostyle

Originally posted by Tellox
And er...be brutal.

Brutal it is then Theres no need for practically all those spacer gifs. You have two BODY tags. Why are all yoru graphics so large (dimension-wise and filesize-wise). A lot of your text is squashed together - eg. "Subject: Test - Posted on: 07-18-2004 14:01" needs a pixel or two margin on top and bottom. The "text" in your graphical headers are way too large in comparison with the rest of the text sizes. The colour seems rather drab - nothing wrong with grey, just not enough variation in hues used.

Learn about TARGETs for your links (they should load in the IFRAME no?) There is no reason you couldn't have a flexible design that catered for a range of browser resolutions, rather than requiring different pages to do it for you.

Content is king - you need more of it.

Tellox

Thanks again
hostyle, you might've already done it, but if not, hit refresh. I've 4 colour schemes in there, seeing as I didnt like green, my artist didnt like blue, the other didnt like either etc..

Content-wise, its empty, seeing as I've only been working on it for about 2 weeks at this stage. Launch date is August 1st, although that might be pushed back further.

For a first design, I dislike it a bit myself. As long as its stable, and provides access to everything, I'm happy, as it lets me start work on a layout I'd actually like, without worrying about time restrictions etc.

I've just looked over the comment page, and yes, I can see how things are messed up. For one, theres two identical forms to fill in. That'll teach me to set it up when I've a stomach bug and about 5hrs of sleep behind me.

Once again, thanks for the critisizm.

ColdFusion

Check it. I played a bit with your content/comment box.

Fergal C

It loads quite slowly for me and I'm on DSL.

I use low res and only clicked the low res link because you asked me to in the first post. If I had just visted your site without seeing your request to click on the low res link I probably would not have done so.

The frames are quite off putting and might make me want to leave the site.

Fergal

mneylon

It's still incredibly slow to load.

maxheadroom

The HTML still doesn't validate. When it does you'll probably see a drop in the paint delay on the site, so it really really really is worth doing.

Also, why is the content in the IFRAME so wide? I've got a huge horizontal scroll bar?

I still think its bad UI design to squash your content into such a small area - surely the content is the most important part of the site?

mneylon

I doubt if the HTML is the only reason for the delay.
There seem to be two other factors:
1. The image size
2. The bandwidth / number of hops to the site

cgarvey

Think its more to do with image sizes, than it being hosted at EV1. My downloads from otecha.com do max out my DSL .. so I am getting 200Kbps+, the latency is 100ms+ higher than an Irish site, but I don't visually notice that.

E.g. www.ev1servers.net loads in the same time (between 5 and 6 seconds) in my browser as www.blacknightsolutions.com (and ev1 appears to have more graphical content than BK).

So latency isn't a huge issue. It is an issue, just not anywhere near as big an issue as the size of the page.

.cg

cgarvey

Originally posted by maxheadroom
The HTML still doesn't validate. When it does you'll probably see a drop in the paint delay on the site, so it really really really is worth doing.

Agreed

Originally posted by maxheadroom
Also, why is the content in the IFRAME so wide? I've got a huge horizontal scroll bar?

Coz there is a <table width=1024....> which is just bad for all sorts of reasons. (It doesn't cause a H scroll in FF)

Originally posted by maxheadroom
I still think its bad UI design to squash your content into such a small area - surely the content is the most important part of the site?

Agreed

.cg

maxheadroom

Originally posted by cgarvey
Coz there is a <table width=1024....> which is just bad for all sorts of reasons. (It doesn't cause a H scroll in FF)

I was actually seeing the H scroll in FF 0.9.2 - I don't use IE unless I have to use windows update...

Tellox

Sorry, havent been working much on it lately, Have been a bit..distracted.

I've taken all suggestions into account and will start work on them sometime over the weekend.

I'd like to point out that the content menu will be used for the news script, mostly. Actual content will appear in the left menu. I'll probably change the menu to load things such as hosted in the content frame, instead of popup windows.

And were you seeing the H Scrollbar in an iframe, or in the actual window? And what res are you running on? I only get H Scrollbars when I've got FF running in window mode..

About the iframes closing twice - That'd be the result of working on the site at around 6 and 7am without any sleep. I at first, stupidly left out the > in the iframe tag. So I basicly had <iframe src=./content etc></iframe </tr>. I'll sort that out last, since an extra tag is about the least of my worries right now.

Ideas for new designs are coming fast and strong, but lack of time seems to be whats letting me down. I've only had the time to make three layouts since I first started, the lowres one, the one you see now, and the first one I made .So from the start, it wasnt really going to be world class material. The general plan as of now is to start adding the content, practise layouts and html for about 3 months or so, and start working on a new layout by christmas. If anybody thinks the design is bad enough that I should delay launching it, and try make a new one, make your voice heard.

maxheadroom

Horizontal scrollbars in the Iframe, when looking at the comments page, using FF 0.9.2 maximised, screen resolution is 1024X768.

Honestly, I think you should reconsider using Iframes at all here, they are terrible for accessibility. And, frames in general are evil

You could implement all of your colour / image changes with alternate stylesheets.

You should consider HTML validation to be the first step in gettin a site ready to go live, if you're not producing valid code then you cant be sure what its going to look like on othe platforms / browsers etc.

cgarvey

Ah, on the comments page.. I get the HScroll too. That's probably to do with the nested 100% widths.

Agree with all MHRs points

.cg

Tellox

yes,its meant to be like that, seeing as I'd be hugely limited when posting news, otherwise..

cgarvey

I could be missing the point again, but I can't see any reason/justification for the H Scroll there.. There is no content (*) on that page that goes beyond the iframe width, and therefore I should not have to scroll horizontally.

If that is what you're talking about, please enlighten me as to why there should be a H Scroll there.

[font size=1](*) With the exception of centered content, which would fit just fine if it was centered within the width of the iframe.[/font]

.cg

mneylon

Horizontal scrolling is simply demented, unless you want to annoy people visiting a site.
If you can't make it display properly without scrolling horizontally then you need to rethink your layout.
You also need to do reduce image sizes. They are far too SLOW downloading.

Tellox

sorry, somehow I read that as vertical...ugh
anyway, Im not seeing any horizontal frames at all in any of the iframes...

maxheadroom

Originally posted by Tellox
sorry, somehow I read that as vertical...ugh
anyway, Im not seeing any horizontal frames at all in any of the iframes...

I've attached a screen grab, it might be helpful.

Oriel

Yeah, for a start, compress the images to web-friendly gifs...
...get rid of the sh!te image to the right of the screen - it adds nothing but annoyance to the site...
...don't have the content of the website is a sh!ty wee text box. You've got fonts/formatting and css - use it wisely...

S.

<edit> and use a background which isn't do-able in Photoshop in literally 30 seconds. I was doing that background 4 years ago...literally...
(And it never made its way on to the web - think about the reasons why...
S.