Please critique: new 891 design
 

I'm in need of some good critiquing of my team's web site, located at http://www.neverendingchaos.com. I just (almost) finished redoing the site, and need some constructive criticism as to where/what to fix or change. I have NOT tested it under any Windows browser, so am unaware of how it looks under Exploder or any other browser there.

Thanks in advance!

Aaron

Re: Please critique: new 891 design
 

The first thing that got me was the colors were dull and that the black text on blue background was hhard to read. Also, having a calender on the front page isn't very good. The biggest thing you need to do it change the color scheme and make the title bar and logo smaller. That'll alow more to be read on the page. I would make your site look more like slashdot, have your news in boxes of white, add more color, and add some boarders on the navigation.

But I do like the made on mac logo. :)

Re: Please critique: new 891 design
 

Your content window appears a bit displaced under IE 6. Additionally, in IE 6 again, your navigation bar has that ugly blue border around it, which makes it look very un professional. You can take that out using the border="0" attribute in your image map.

Otherwise good job! You have a decent site ;)

Re: Please critique: new 891 design
 

Yeah, get rid of the blue border. Also, try to nudge that down a tad so that the tabs look like they are tabs OF something, like...the page.

Re: Please critique: new 891 design
 

Sorry 'bout that. According to W3C, the border tag is no longer part of HTML 4 ;) - and standards-compliant browsers such as Safari and Mozilla don't show the border.

IE 6 doesn't handle well some CSS elements, it seems. I'll have to take a look at that.

Re: Please critique: new 891 design
 

It's a good website. As mentioned before the calender doesn't look right especially on the first page that you see. Same goes for the phone #. As a suggestion you might want to put the team logo/number or previous years robot as the first page and move the calender to it's own link. The calender seems to be for your team members and not the general public. One other thing the words underneath where you list the radio stations are half cut off and I can't scroll any father down. This may only be an IE6 issue.

Re: Please critique: new 891 design
 

First thing, when I click on the Multimedia tab, the navbar totally disappears (except for Safari's image placeholder).

Second, the content looks too plain. You use a nice font for the title and the Navbar but then you just stick with the default TNR and default colors. I think you need to make the content match the rest of the site a bit more.

Other than that, I like how simple it is and the ease of navigation. I, personally, like the colors. Good job.

Re: Please critique: new 891 design
 

The multimedia tab is an acknowledged problem, I seem to have misplaced the file somewhere.

I think the scrolling thing has to do with IE6 and its handling of fixed CSS objects.

It's still a work in progress, I'm gonna tweak the design some over the rest of this week to make it more aesthetically pleasing.

Any other design suggestions are still of course welcome, I'll keep workin' on it :)

Re: Please critique: new 891 design
 

Well, biggest thing is it looks like your layers are off... I ran into this in Mozilla and IE. I attached a screenshot so you can see what I mean. It was better in IE then Mozilla, but it was still there. I have always had problems getting them to line up properly, and every browser handles them differently. (One of the joys I have with working with .net is it handles different browsers for you, so no need to worry about that :D )

One thing I just noticed, not sure if you were aware of it or not, your calendar is not showing any previous days. Just today and forward. Not sure if it was intended that way or not...

Other small bug is the chief delphi tab isn't getting it's selected color. When you click on the cd link, the news tab is lit up.

The only other thing I will mention... these are the browser type stats from my website for the month of January. 92% of my hits came from IE. It only makes sense to make a site that will be compatible with IE.

no.: reqs: pages: browser
---: -----: -----: -------
1: 72382: 3707: MSIE
: 63455: 3218: MSIE/6
: 8919: 487: MSIE/5
: 8: 2: MSIE/4
2: 4803: 212: Mozilla
: 4133: 184: Mozilla/1
: 94: 5: Mozilla/0
3: 453: 42: Netscape (compatible)
4: 36: 26: Googlebot
: 36: 26: Googlebot/2
5: 345: 21: Netscape
: 237: 15: Netscape/4
: 108: 6: Netscape/6
6: 522: 18: Opera
: 518: 17: Opera/7
: 4: 1: Opera/6



Now, that's just the critism part... You've done a really nice job on the site so far. The biggest thing that I personally have problems with is making the site user friendly. As a programmer, I have in my head exactly how I want it to work, and I know my way around. The problem is that users can see what's in my head. I ended up buying a book by Steve Krug, called Don't make me think. He spends most of the book going through and talking about how users see websites... anyhow, the whole point to this... you've done a pretty nice job laying things out any making it easy to get around the site. There are probably a few things you could do to make it flow better, but that's the eternal struggle of a web developer. Check out that book on amazon though. It has quite a large chunk of it online, and it's a pretty short book. Lots of good stuff to think about though.

Re: Please critique: new 891 design
 

I see the screenshot. That's pretty weird. I'll play around with it some but I don't know what it might be aside from butchering CSS. Worked under Mozilla, IE, Omniweb and Safari under Mac OS X.
That's intended. It's meant for quick at a glance reference for team members and their parents.
Fixed that. I went to fix another bug and did a quick copy paste on everything....copy-pasted too much :)
Our own statistics are skewed a bit. Our district's machines are primarily Macs, so our site visits since launch are roughly fifty-fifty mac/pc. Of the ~50% on PCs, it's primarily IE 5/5.5. I'll play with it, tho.
I've tried :)