College Project feedback!

BopNiblets

Well lookit that, a website review forum, I'll be darned!
It's just a mockup of course (no backend), nothing spectacular, bit of jQuery and stuff, just looking for a bit of feedback on the design part (does it look nice at least?)

http://randomblob.110mb.com/

Used Notepad++ for most of it.

Note the XHTML does actually validate properly just not on this host because it adds a bit of crap to each of my pages.

Also wondering where to next? Should I just start making up some random sites myself or how do you pro people get inspired for your portfolio ideas?
Thanks.

cormee

It's very nice, well done. Nice, fitting design and very usable. Only thing that would need a bit of work would be SEO, page title, SEO friendly h1, small things like that, also link your logo/banner to the homepage. But otherwise I can't fault it. Best way to work on your portfolio is to build sites around things that interest you. If you keep building sites to that standard you won't have any problems getting web work.

p

Code-wise it's pretty decent. Design-wise it could be a lot better.

Thoie

I like it in general, very nice. Here's a few things you might want to consider:

• Despite the fact that you mention the bat-logos are for scrolling, it's not immediately obvious, and you have to remember most users don't bother reading the helpful text you've provided
• As your prices are in Euro, "Shopping basket" would be preferable to "Shopping cart".
• A way to change the quantity of a particular item would be useful.
• Consider adding a space between the € and the amount on the checkout page - if I decide to order 10 of a particular type of comic the alignment will get pushed out.
• In the popup boxes for the comic details, the image is clickable, yet all that does is close the box, which is not intuitive. If the image is to be clickable, I'd prefer that it would show me a large image of the cover.
• Despite what I said earlier, some text on the login page would be helpful - what are the benefits of logging in/registering? What are your privacy policies if I give you personal information?
• A total/subtotal for the shopping cart on the right hand side would be nice - ideally at the top (given that if I add enough items that box can scroll down quite some distance).

BopNiblets

Thanks for input guys.

Thoie: as I said it's just the frontend, we're doing Rails in the course too for the backend (pic attached) which is what I'm working on at the moment and have some of that cart functionality on the server-side version working, but you've some good points there.

The whole thing is still a work in progress I guess.

Creamy Goodness

looks great for a college project, one minor niggle though and this is purely my opinion but i really dislike those w3c compliant badges.

BopNiblets

Heh, I suppose I put them in there for our lecturer really, gotta get those marks!

Do you suggest get rid of them altogether?
(I suppose they're useless on that specific webhost since it's adding code to my pages anyway and thus making them validate incorrectly)
Or maybe making something a bit more subtle like text links that do the same thing?

Creamy Goodness

leave them in actually, i dislike them on live public sites as i expect everything to by compliant, but for a college project there's no hard having them there. could be the difference between grades actually.

cormee

Creamy Goodness wrote: »

leave them in actually, i dislike them on live public sites as i expect everything to by compliant, but for a college project there's no hard having them there. could be the difference between grades actually.

You'd be sadly disappointed so! A very small % of sites are actually compliant, even Google.ie has 39 errors according to the w3c validator.

I'd say leave them in (but keep them discreet) if you or your site espouses standards, when I see the buttons I instantly assume they've put extra effort into their code and strive for that extra level of professionalism.