Feedback Needed

Shanley

Hows it going, about to launch my first website in about two weeks time just looking for some feedback before i go any further, be as brutally honest as possible!

www.galwayuncovered.com

To get into the site,
User Name:Beta
Password:Login

Thanks,
Conor.

dkell

Hey Conor,

I just took a quick look the homepage and some things that jumped out were:
- The logo at the top doesn't look great; I don't think it fits with the look of the rest of the site.
- The username / forgotten password etc links at the top are pretty difficult to see; the text is too dark for the dark background;
- Some of the images in the banner seem stretched, which makes them a look bit unclear. You may be better using images of the correct size rather than changing their dimensions with html / css (if that's what's happening).
- It's the same with the text in the blue Galway Uncovered box under the banner - it looks squashed.

Shanley

Thanks for the feedback! I changed the login to the colour of the logo and made the logo smaller! (suggest a better colour choice for both the logo and the login if you have one)

As for the images they are not the final images for the website, still have to get high quality images for those.

mneylon

Resize the images properly - http://www.galwayuncovered.com/galwayuncovered.png - is very big - you're just using the img tag to make it appear smaller

im...LOST

The flash slideshow isn't fantastic. It's just the images are all stretched and stuff. Looks nasty.

Logo isn't fantastic either. Other than that though, it's kinda cool.

And make a .ico image

cgarvey

Images. All wrong.

If it's Joomla (looks like it, or something like it, from the URLs), consider friendly URLs for SEO.

The dark blue on black I'm not all that fond of. The smaller text (in that colour) is hard to read, and the logo looks faded.

The what's on tonight strikes me as more urgent content that should be one of the first things (if not the first thing) a user should see, rather than in an ugly list down at the end of the page. How about replacing the thumbnails top right with a panel of scrolling (swiping style, not marquee style!) events?

Nearly there .. just some tidy up, and get some content up there!

Shanley

I have an .ico but it shows up once and then just dissapears

As for the images on the slideshow they should be alright when I launch the website (the only high quality image I have on it the the first one of Fibber Magees which I feel looks ok.

About putting the events calender up, is there any point of having my 'welcome to galwayuncovered.com' stuff on the website if its going to be at the bottom?

Thanks for reminding me to make it google friendly too! Example events calender is up now, i cant add the content for the bar & club profiles yet because I have to find out which bars are interested and take proper photos of the places.

cgarvey

Hey, if you're happy with it, then that's all that matters! I'm certainly not going to argue my points with you!

p

It's not a bad attempt at a first website, but overall it's not professional grade yet.

The design is pieced together and there's no overall thought gone into how things balance together. There's very poor attention to detail on speicifc things like typography, font size, alignment and spacing. There's no contrast between elements and there's no visual hierarchy. You should be guiding you visitors eyes via contrast and position, there's no clear message here. The logo is a poor color, has been resized and squashed and doesn't fit in with the overall site.

It's not a terrible site. It's amateur grade and could be a lot better. However, a lot of the problems are the kinds of mistakes we all did when starting out, so it's not a bad thing, it's something you learn as you go along. Once you've got the technical side of things down then you tend to improve the design cause you can focus less on implementation.

Take a look at The Morning After, a free theme for Wordpress. It's quite similar content wise to what you're doing but it's very well designed. Look at it, asses it, see what it deos well and then see if you can apply some of those lessons to your site.
http://themasterplan.in/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/home_preview_themorningafte.png

Congrasts on getting the site done & good luck with it in the future.