Site Ratings & Reviews - new site critique

Author

new site critique

rebecca

2005-03-15, 7:18 am

Hi there. Any critiques on my design are welcome.

http://www.circle-9.com

Thanks!

-R

Beauregard T. Shagnasty

2005-03-15, 7:18 am

rebecca wrote:
> Hi there. Any critiques on my design are welcome.
>
> http://www.circle-9.com

This one is nearly the same as your other site stephenkasner.com
I don't care for either one of them. Frames ... slow to load ...
unnecessary splash entry pages ... won't fit in my browser window ...
browser sniffing ... very gray ...

--
-bts
-This space intentionally left blank.

D4VE

2005-03-15, 7:32 am

quote:
Originally posted by rebecca
Hi there. Any critiques on my design are welcome.

http://www.circle-9.com

Thanks!

-R

Hi Rebecca,

You could do this site very easily in CSS and it would work very nicely. Its essentially a 2 column layout.
Frames are bad, very bad IMO.
It could do with some more colour (or shades of grey if you want) I can see the effect you have gone for, but I think you can still add a little texture or colour to improve it.

Also when you click enter on the splash screen you go to a blank page. To see news you then have to click news.
It would be better if it went straight to news imo.

undream

2005-03-15, 10:41 pm

quote:
Originally posted by D4VE
Hi Rebecca,

You could do this site very easily in CSS and it would work very nicely. Its essentially a 2 column layout.
Frames are bad, very bad IMO.
It could do with some more colour (or shades of grey if you want) I can see the effect you have gone for, but I think you can still add a little texture or colour to improve it.

Also when you click enter on the splash screen you go to a blank page. To see news you then have to click news.
It would be better if it went straight to news imo.

Hi Dave,

Thanks for the advice! I thought about doing this site purely with CSS, but the truth is simply that I haven't done a 2 column layout with CSS before, and frames are so easy!

I have received a lot of negative feedback about the frames though, even though they seem rather unobtrusive to me, so I may change that.

As far as the colors, I did exactly what the artist wanted, so...

ANd I may take your advice on the news section vs blank page, too.

Thanks again.

-Rebecca

Chris Beall

2005-03-31, 11:28 pm

rebecca wrote:
> Hi there. Any critiques on my design are welcome.
>
> http://www.circle-9.com
>
> Thanks!
>
> -R

Viewed with Netscape 7.1 at 600 X 800 full screen.

Horizontal scrolling on Posters page. Same on Original Works page.

Artists page displays thumbnails, but there's no link to an enlarged
version. Odd that the larger images on Posters and Original Works have
links to still larger versions.

Can't right click to view source or save images (for the 15 seconds it
took me to disable scripting...). Note that this makes it hard to
display linked pages using the tabbed browsing that is a key feature of
Gekko-based browsers.

News/Updates text lines are too long. Try adding max-width: 30em.
(Won't work on IE, though). Low contrast between text and background,
hence hard to read.

Except for the navigation, text is smaller than I like for easy reading.

Chris Beall

kchayka

2005-03-31, 11:28 pm

Chris Beall wrote:
> rebecca wrote:
>
> Except for the navigation, text is smaller than I like for easy reading.

Should also mention that medium dark gray text on medium light gray
background is near impossible to read.

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Reply email address is a bottomless spam bucket.
Please reply to the group so everyone can share.

jake

2005-04-01, 6:40 pm

In message <39n59tF62pq68U1@individual.net>, rebecca
<rebecca@treasurehiding.com> writes
>Hi there. Any critiques on my design are welcome.
>
>http://www.circle-9.com
>
>Thanks!
>
>-R

A few initial thoughts:

(a) Using javascript to disable the right mouse button will delay
someone accessing your HTML for at least 4 or 5 seconds; it serves no
purpose, except to annoy people in this NG who want to look at the HTML
(this is alt.html.critique, after all).

(b) You have the wrong <!doctype> for the frameset page.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">

is the one you want.
(See: <http://www.w3.org/QA/2002/04/valid-dtd-list.html> )

(c) You have no <noframes></noframes> defined in your frameset page.
People using browsers with no frames support or frames support disabled
will see nothing. As will many search engines.

You might want to add the links in your navigation frame to a <noframes>
section on the frameset page to provide both alternative navigation, and
SE access to the pages.

To allow for 'orphaned' pages, you should also have a link on each page
back to the frameset page.

(d) If these are 'new' pages you might want to consider using 'strict',
rather than 'transitional' HTML.

(e) Ensure that the contents of <title></title> reflect the contents of
the *page*, not just "Circle-9".

(f) Review your HTML markup:
* Lose the <br><br> with suitable margins in your CSS
* Delimit your paragraphs with <p></p>
* Mark up your headers as H1, H2 etc . -- don't just apply style to the
text.

(g) Don't use 'px' to specify font size (IE users can't easily increase
the size of text if they need to) -- use '%', with 100% for the body
text.

(h) The file sizes of the images are much bigger than they need to be.
Reduce the file sizes -- dial-up users will appreciate this. (320k for
two small images?)

(i) Enlarging the text causes horizontal scrolling in Opera.

(j) Grey scroll bars on a grey background -- not a good idea; nor is the
low contrast between background and text.

regards.

--
Jake