my turn for a site review...

Seth Brundle

www.kbannon.com/templates/

[ awaits for the years of flak to be returned! ]

Kai

Wow, im sorry to say i dont like it that much. The black headings are too bold making them slightly hard to read and they dont seem to fit in with the site at all. Im not fond of your logo either . Its not a bad design but does need a bit more work to balance it up a bit.

ianmc38

Not too keen on any part of the site myself.

Ph3n0m

thats it on 800 x 600

any higher and the menu starts to expand in width

Seth Brundle

cheers
I changed the font to verdana which is causing the wrapping.
I'll do a bit on it tonight or tomorrow to brighten it up. I know it needs more but my imagination sucks!

The Corinthian

I’m going to comment on the content rather than the design.

First of all, what is the mission statement of this site? What is it supposed to be? A site advertising your services (hence the ‘solutions’ in the title), a resource site for developers (hence the side menu headings) or something else?

Secondly, your content. To begin with, once you decide to populate your home page with something that is not in Latin, what will it be? Does your, presumably, introductory home page text merit that much space and if so should you have that much text on the front page?

As for the headings, will these be articles or links to articles - even the latter are a significant undertaking to keep up to date.

Whatever about the design, you really have to go back to first principles on why you are doing the site. That you have the domain name is not enough reason. And from those first principles you can develop its information architecture, not the other way around.

Serbian

The current issue of A List Apart has an article about Home Page Goals. Some interesting points brought up which would go some way to address the points that The Corinthian has brought up.

As for the site, I'm not keen on a few things. I think there should be more space between the navigation on the left and the header. The navigation div should be a fixed width so it doesn't stretch at higher resolutions. You could fit all the information in the footer on one line, the copyright notice to the left, the links in the middle and the valid CSS / HTML to the right. I also think the copyright text should be a darker shade of grey to make it more readable.

Think of semantics too. The "kbannon.com new site" should be in a h1 tag and maybe make it blue like the links in a Serif font, the headers in the nav should be h2. h3+ can be used for headers in your text.

Maybe you could look into some free stock photography to jazz up the site and create a more professional look. Here are a few sites you can explore:

http://www.stockvault.net/
http://www.sxc.hu/
http://www.morguefile.com/
http://www.pixelperfectdigital.com/

If you are stuck for design ideas you can take a look at Open Source Web Design Templates to get some ideas. You can copy any element of those templates since, as the name suggests, they are open source.

Seth Brundle

The Corinthian wrote:

I’m going to comment on the content rather than the design...
<snip>

The template will be used internally rather as a homepage (which will soon be largely blank!).
I have a rake of notes that I will password protect for some of my classes and I will also flog some of the apps I have developed over the years.

Serbian wrote:

The current issue of A List Apart has an article about Home Page Goals. Some interesting points brought up which would go some way to address the points that The Corinthian has brought up.

As for the site, I'm not keen on a few things. I think there should be more space between the navigation on the left and the header. The navigation div should be a fixed width so it doesn't stretch at higher resolutions. You could fit all the information in the footer on one line, the copyright notice to the left, the links in the middle and the valid CSS / HTML to the right. I also think the copyright text should be a darker shade of grey to make it more readable.

Think of semantics too. The "kbannon.com new site" should be in a h1 tag and maybe make it blue like the links in a Serif font, the headers in the nav should be h2. h3+ can be used for headers in your text.

Maybe you could look into some free stock photography to jazz up the site and create a more professional look. Here are a few sites you can explore:

http://www.stockvault.net/
http://www.sxc.hu/
http://www.morguefile.com/
http://www.pixelperfectdigital.com/

If you are stuck for design ideas you can take a look at Open Source Web Design Templates to get some ideas. You can copy any element of those templates since, as the name suggests, they are open source.

excellent links and these will help a lot.
I actually got the original template from oswd.org

Thanks for all the opinion folks - I'll work on it tomorrow when I get a moment.

rsynnott

kbannon wrote:

The template will be used internally rather as a homepage (which will soon be largely blank!).
I have a rake of notes that I will password protect for some of my classes and I will also flog some of the apps I have developed over the years.

If you are selling things, then you probably don't want ads.

py2006

Serbian wrote:

Maybe you could look into some free stock photography to jazz up the site and create a more professional look. Here are a few sites you can explore:

http://www.stockvault.net/
http://www.sxc.hu/
http://www.morguefile.com/
http://www.pixelperfectdigital.com/

If you are stuck for design ideas you can take a look at Open Source Web Design Templates to get some ideas. You can copy any element of those templates since, as the name suggests, they are open source.

Wow, can you really use the images on them sites for your own personal use?

aidan_walsh

py2006 wrote:

Wow, can you really use the images on them sites for your own personal use?

With many stock photo sites, you have to buy the rights.

DonkeyStyle \o/

"Internet Solutions"... I can't tell you how much I hate that buzzword.
Unless you're a giant corporation who can offer the moon and the stars, I'd just drop it... it comes across waffly.
How about something more concise, less generic, something that gives a more clear picture of exactly what you offer.

That google ad seems really out of place up in the header, it distracts from your own branding/image/design/whatever by making the header div all cluttered... not to mention it wrapping badly and breaking out of the div and squashing the rest of the header content.
tbh I wouldn't want the focus of this div to be an ugly google ad.
I'd suggest moving it down into the body text somewhere, and try filling that otherwise conspicuous header whitespace some other way. (maybe move the header links out there)

Consider a slightly smaller font for the nav categories (Help & Resources etc.)

I agree with Serbian about the space between the left nav and header... I think what throws me in that area are all the horisontal lines... you've got the bottom border of the header, then the underlined links, then the top border of the left nav... let's just say my eyes are ready to burst into tears with confusion

The footer looks a bit lonely aswell, I'd second the suggestion about having it all on one line... maybe tone it down a bit and have it sitting on the white page background... just to see how it looks... maybe you could keep the divs top-border and use it as a <hr> to visually seperate it from the above body text.

The KB logo is a bit on the blurry side, and the drop-shadow (and resulting white area that couldn't be made transparent) looks weird against the grey div background... I'd say start over with a new logo and forget about gif transparency... all you have to do is keep the logo image in another file with its layers still intact... that way it's a breeze to go back and change the background colour of the logo image if you need to change the underlying div colour.

The whole colour scheme feels a bit subdued and depressing aswell. (damn even the a:hover background is grey!)
I'd try bumping up the saturation on that blue text... inject some vibrancy in there somewhere.

Don't take any of this as condescending or anything, I don't claim to be a pro, I hate all my own stuff aswell... endlessly scrapping designs and restarting.
Just adding my 2c.

Serbian

py2006 wrote:

Wow, can you really use the images on them sites for your own personal use?

I know with StockVault, you can use them for free if it's a non-commercial site, with MorgueFile, Stock.Xchng and Pixel Perfect you can use them in a commercial project for free.