Does this look alright?

Xylophonic

I just wnat to know what other boards members think of this website. I have had a lot of criticism over it, with people saying I shouldnt use tables, but they never really give me an alternative way of doing it.

Is there anyway I can improve the site, or should I rebuild it frm scratch?

http://www.dublintransport.com

Thanks for your time

YeAh!

Not from a designers perspective (as I am not on), but from a person who while surfing the web and if came across this site would immediately leave. Too basic altogether, just looks a bit childish

Rollo Tamasi

not nice visually, very plain, bare, lack of graphics, too bright, poor contrast with the colours, low interactivity, lack of content, tables are not a good idea for design.....i would start from scratch. What's your favourite website? Try to aspire to that and you will do well.

wheres me jumpa

Put simply its very basic.

However you havent fallen into the usual traps of scrolling/flashing text etc. The use of tables is not a bad thing, far from it. CSS is an alternative to tables and is well worth looking into but for the moment I would focus on improving your current table based layout.

SOme simple tips. Perhaps you could make the table say 80% wide and centre it. Add a border to it as well. Your content isnt really filling the screen so just make the content area smaller.

Give the table a different colour to the background, try and avoid white space.

The header and navigation is ugly to be honest. Look around at other sites and see how they do there navigation. Get a graphics editor and play around with some images/text for a logo or get someone to help in that department.

As for the content, im not really sure what sort of information you are providing or more importantly why you are providing it.

PixelTrawler

just a very simple suggestion

Why not make the site more in line with the blog page which is not a bad layout....

Change the header and away you go. Its also xhtml (built with css) so it might be a good start point for you to learn

DonkeyStyle \o/

I think it's improved nicely since the last time you posted.
It could still use some work, but I think tweaking and improvement half the fun of running a personal project site.

Again with some basic usability observations... I feel the links to the forum and blog take me away from the site too much... like I'm reading three different websites.
tbh I think the content of the blog would be perfect for the home/index page, underneath the welcome message... you could then replace the 'blog' menu link with a proper link back to home/index (instead of clicking the 'dublin-transport' link (which I didn't notice right away))

The colours are still a bit yucky... I beg you to try out some different ones... try getting a graphics program with a decent colour-picker... pick out some ones you like, scribble them down and see what works together.
What you've got right now is super-mega-ultra-saturated pure colours... like if you look at the hex rgb values you're using #00FFFF and #FFFF00... it's all either 0% or 100%... there are some interesting shades between 00 and FF... worth exploring IMO.

I agree with jumpa, CSS is cool but it's not going to solve your most immediate problems.
The whole content area (the white part) just seems to be hanging off the bottom of the page... it looks lost and could definitely use some ballance with the top.
Bring some colour down there and consider the 80% table idea as above... look around, pay close attention to how other sites handle the presentation of their content... more narrow table widths to constrain the text... wide lines of text are harder to read than more narrow ones.

IMO the site is just crying out for a picture of a bus in the title (or something to make it look less drab and maybe communicate something visually)... the guys over in the digital art/design board might whip up something for you if you ask them nicely... since it's not a commercial site, I don't think anyone would have a problem cooking one up.

There again, content is king... and if people are interested in the information you provide then they'd have to be pretty simple in the head to leave because they didn't like the design.
The design is just the icing on the cake for a content oriented site like this, you're not selling anything or trying to project some glamorous/professional image, so personally I'd focus first on making the site structure solid and easy to navigate... make it usefull, interesting, easy on the brain/eyes and then worry about making it pretty.

forbairt

Hmm... Having looked at your site .. I'll ask .. are you happy with it ?

Main problems I have with it
The colors aren't working on it
The font isn't working for me
You've a blog and a forum that both have different styles to them ?

You might think about not making the site live when you're still working on it ?

Can I suggest having a look at something like oswd.org choosing one of their designs and modifying it ? Alternatively as has been suggested ... Find a site you like and work from there on it ?

Rollo Tamasi

why don't you just keep the blog & forum and drop everything else. You can get a coppermine mod for wordpress for your images, you can add a calander for your timetable fairly easily to wordpress too.

I presume your hosting supports php/mysql so why not install the forum on your own host rather than going to another site to host it for you?

All you need to do imo is to design up a nice blog interface that actually reflects your site. I don't know what crayons have to with buses!

jmcc

Xylophonic wrote:

Is there anyway I can improve the site, or should I rebuild it frm scratch?

http://www.dublintransport.com

I think that the colours are meant to be the Dublin team colours. But the light blue comes across as more turquoise (even thought it may appear as such on logos.) You should also make better use of the front page. The huge white area detracts from the content buttons in the upper right hand corner with the effect that people will be left staring at some text in the middle of the screen. It creates a kind of tunnel vision effect.

The yellow on the forum background completely overwhelms the content. You've got to be careful with background colours for a text rich website. Using a bright yellow background is a bit of a mistake.You've got a lot of good content - but it is text and image based. The design does not have to be too fancy because people are visiting the site for the content.

Regards...jmcc

Xylophonic

Rollo Tamasi wrote:

why don't you just keep the blog & forum and drop everything else. You can get a coppermine mod for wordpress for your images, you can add a calander for your timetable fairly easily to wordpress too.

I presume your hosting supports php/mysql so why not install the forum on your own host rather than going to another site to host it for you?...

tbh, I had thought of this and have attempted this before. I have installed different verion of phpBB, punBB, XMB etc..

But when setting up a new mysql database it asks me to use a charset and I don't know which one to use. Most times after this my forum would not be able to function with signs like:

€, £, $, & ' etc.

This is what eventually sent me back to proboards, if I knew how to sort this I would stay with phpBB cos I liked them. Someone told me to use the same charset as my website but this one is not available for me to select..

MartMax

Xylophonic wrote:

But when setting up a new mysql database it asks me to use a charset and I don't know which one to use. Most times after this my forum would not be able to function with signs like:

€, £, $, & ' etc.

Hi Xylo

Can you explain that again, I am not getting it? I don't remember anything like that when setting up mySQL database through cPanel.

Btw, I agree that WordPress is one out-of-box solution, simple, powerful but easy to customise to your needs. You can start using other templates around and learn how to tweak those. Loads of support and guide around the net and from their community itself.

Mart

Rollo Tamasi

what charset do you have as options? is charset=iso-8859-1 available?
that's the most common one anyways.

Xylophonic

Thats the one I was told to use but its not available, most of the UTF-8 sets are