Site Crit
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- 6 Responses
- hiphoprelic
Let 'er rip...
I can't seem to get the Mini Features block to play nice with explorer. !#@$? !!!
- ukit0
The homepage strikes me as cluttered and busy without a clear call to action or indication of what this site does or why I should care. Scale back the loud colors and rethink the home layout would be my advise. Also, why do you have two logos?
Inner pages are not as bad but lack context, maybe add a breadcrumb or better indication of where the user is in the site.
- tasty0
does the header come with 3d glasses?
- jevad0
does the header come with 3d glasses?
tasty
(Sep 7 07, 13:58)lol
- mg330
I like the nav tabs, colors are nice, but need a rollover effect, even if it's just a color change.
Banner Graphics: Too old of a style. Looks like cheap Photoshop filters merged with PowerPoint template graphics.
Why do you have the site name twice at the top?
Day Trip, Gourmet, Featured Homes... these are headings... they should be distinguished in some way, bold text would work great.
Mini Features: pixel font looks bad, it's the only place you use it and it just doesn't fit the site.
At the very bottom, the Eating Right section: Why is your letter spacing so wide and different from everything else?
At the top, the "Click Here" with an arrow to subscribe is just tacky. Make a better banner for subscribing elsewhere in the site where the objective is obvious. A "click here" arrow as you've used just looks like an afterthought, or that you assume people are dumb.
Oh, and above all: figure out how to write clean code. XHTML validator in Firefox returns 170 Warnings from divs in tables, to improper tables to no alt tags, etc. etc.
Sorry to be so harsh but you've got some work to do.
- hiphoprelic0
I don't mind the harshness. When helpful.
My consistency is surely lacking. I also see what you mean by call to action, and lack of focus.
The site was created with Joomla, which is the reason for the dirty code. I had to hack the modles pretty heavily to get it to not look like every other Joomla site out there.
Thanks for the ideas. Will commence cleanup.
- Nairn0
Strange site.
Your internal pages are almost quite decent, if you ignore the slipshod intra-section navigation. You really need to think about this a quite a bit more - it's [presumably] early days for your site, yet already older content is hidden behind pages and pages of paginated links.
Also - where is this content from? It took me a while to spot that it's sourced from Louisiana Homes & Gardens, an [again, presuambly] established print production - should this not be mentioned further up the page? At first glance, it's hard to distinguish your site from any other thieving blog aggregator. Personally, I'd have the Louis. H&G shout as a small but noticable shout in your masthead. Aaah, yes - the masthead - I don't want to sound like a twat - but it is truly awful. Patently thrown together by someone with zero design nous from the offcuts of the last decade's design failures. Less really is more. Aside from looking awful, it tells me nothing about your site's intention.
Do you have by lines available in your content database? If you do, and if your print-sister has quality writers, I'd consider adding them in-site - aside from anything, done appropriately, you could gain an extra tier of 2ndry nav ("Click here to Read more by this author"?)
Also, I'd be wary of calling your first sectional nav button 'homes' - it's too similar to 'home', which I'm sure most of your users would expect to take them to the index page.
If I were you, I'd sit down and watch some none-nerds use your site - I just don't think your target demographic will find it easy to use.