I'm going to be setting up my own company with a few other developers/designers to try and get a bit of extra pocket money, and one day maybe go full time with it.
Anyhow, can some of you lovely internet savy people please give your opinions on this design:
www.3wdl.co.uk/
If, rather than saying, "It's fecking shite", you could say exactly what you don't like about it, and any suggestions that you may have, i'd appreciate it!
can't get to sleep until the karaoke bar stops patching the hole punched through their wall into the bar so:
like:
• works well on small screens (800x600), and the odd padding/boxed content is a little striking on big screens (1600x1200)
• good clean layout. no teethgrinding flashwankery.
• text's content matches the layout - short, sharpish, to the point
don't like:
• gah. text as graphics and then anti-aliased. antialiasing should be used with EXTREME care on anything precise such as text. in these cases, it makes the text harder to read on some screen sizes, not easier. it also looks sloppier than text on most screen sizes. suggest you fix your logo and your top-left pic and your leftsidebar gfx.
• headings should be easy to read, these are grey and thus harder to read than the text. suggest change colours.
suggestions/other:
• tidyup text: de-capitalise marketing gurus or else capitalise all jobs; lose the "'" in Guru's. prefer to see "custom built" hyphenated to make surrounding sentence easier to read.
• did you MEAN to use american spelling?
• reword 2nd-last sentence as "Established in 1999, our primary goal was to provide affordable web site services for small to medium sized businesses based around London and Essex."
• why just essex? if you can make london you can zip out to kent or oxfordshire or surrey, surely?
• for that matter, you claim all of UK in first line. contradiction needs sorting out/deciding. you might like to say in last para that you prefer to work in UK due to importance of face2face mtgs. otherwise, it's the net- why restrict selves to 1 country?
• the mini-heading below the Contact button-- seems either out of place or else a repetition of the main section's heading, or else an odd heading for the advertisement(?) just below it
sorry:
OSs used to check: Mac OS X 10.3.9 and Mac OS 9.1
Browsers used to check: Netscape 7.2 and 7.02 respectively
other browsers:
Firefox 1.0:
no real change, tho the grey headers seem a little fuzzier (could be past my bedtime)
Safari 1.3:
no real change
Opera 7.51:
no real change
IE 5.2:
no real change
Virtual PC 7
, Windows XP Pro 5.1
, , IE 6.0:
no real change. in fact, with that screen set to 1280x1024, the top right text is the clearest of any screen
oh good, no more building. just indian taxi drivers passing time at the tops of their deaf little voices and arrogant thai neighbours ditto. earplugs, bed.
hope this was some use to you
You may want to think about it also from an accessability point of view: I can't make the text bigger, and if I'm totally blind then I'll have no idea what your site is about.
And (just out of interest) why 3wdl?
somewhat ironic that you're asking for opinions on webdesign when you're already a er.. published author if you will.
the slogan doesn't match the sloan in the top right corner.
the design doesn't really gel for me, perhaps its the different blues and the fact that it seems cramped up. Though I'm in an icafe so i can't play with resolutions or anything ;l
when i get home i'll rip it apart though :D
Thanks all - I should of probally mentioned that it hasn't been put into HTML yet, which is why you change change the font size - it's just a first draft of what I will use for the design.
I'm not to keen on the menu, so i'll probally change that, although I like the functions of it when it's into CSS, so maybe I'll just change the size/color.
Thanks for all the comments so far.
I can put on a kitten if you wish
:D
> somewhat ironic that you're asking for opinions on webdesign when you're already a er.. published author if you will.
"ironic"? sensible.
no Professional professional fails to check his work against his audience/market, especially in IT.
coders solving a problem that bugs them have the advantage of being able to decide if their own output solves their own problem.
but everyone else needs to check.
a surprising number of people seem to think this involves a loss in status or respect somehow, or that their work sets them in the rôle of priest shepherding a worshipful flock. webdesigners in particular seem to have developed an internal culture that they know better than web users what web users should really
appreciate. "oddly" (irony), they're nearly always wrong. e.g.: flash sites and javascript-driven click-thrus (which prevent tabbing). e.g.: tom coates' bbc site's archived-show retrieval's URI map/hierarchy. his refusal to believe there was a difference between a unique internal key and non-unique external map(s) led to him almost immediately closing comments on his blog post that had called for comments (plaudits) on the design, because no one had anything positive to say and everyone offered the same improvements suggestions. he had been so very proud of the solution to identifying a unique key. so the comments were offensive to him. but rather than recognise he'd missed a crucial user desire by getting wrapped up in one hidden technical problem, he dismissed their comments as missing the point then closed the discussion after a day or two. (possibly this was just his site's automatic setting, but with no email address it raised a few eyebrows)
to me, a professional ALWAYS checks, checks again, and constantly iteratively checks actual result against intended result. and each time, makes a considered cost-benefit-sensibleness assessment on further work/directions.
hmm. spot the sore point...
sorry robotnik, major overreaction to a throwaway aside on your part
I consider myself to be an unprofessional professional.
Or is it a professional unprofessional?
I don't know. but I do know that I don't give a toss about my job.
i refer to myself as a professional nonprofessional
I refer to myself as a tosser.
Posted by
Brock, 9th June 2005:
What a coincidence. That's what we call you behind your back.
;)
less likely to get squirted that way, you see
Okay, I've had a proper look around. The Margaret Thatcher head is a bit distressing, and the rabbit looks a bit blocky, like it's made out of pixels. The bit with the spinning and the fish is incredible, and the same can go for the soundtrack. The flames could symbolise some kind of apocalyptic vision, but I don't know if that's what you're going for. And the ending! How romantic!
Reminded me of the bit where they hit the ground.
a description of early b3ta animations, non?
they get worse after lunch