The New Team 240 Site

[iBob]

I'd like some quick feedback on the design of the new Team 240 site. Keep in mind not all the pages are up, and not all of them have the new content, for example the member bios is not right. I'm mainly looking for feedback on the design aspect. The New Website

[robot180]

I think you did a great job with this site. I have a few suggestions.

It looks like the table of contents (down the left side) is right aligned. You should center align or left or whatever you want just as long as it has a little space on each side of the words. It looks a little like they are sort of cut off by the black to the right of them.

You might try making a sort of hyperlink hovering effect. For example, make the links change color when the mouse moves over them.

I noticed that you don't use a stylesheet. I like to use them, but that is entirely up to you. It doesn't matter what you use. It's how it comes out in the end, but I wanted to say that I like how everything is layed out with tables. That is my style as well. I don't know why no one else likes doing that. I am also not sure if it was typed out or made in a WYSIWYG editor. The only thing that matters is how it works in the end.

It got a little confusing, navigation wise, how you set up your hyperlinks in the column on the left. When I went to the page, I assumed I could use those to navigate or use the ones across the top. I later realized that the ones on the left change depending on the page that is linked at the top. In other words, you might try making two sets of links, side by side, on the left, where the left set never changes from page to page, but the right set does for each section of the website.

I don't know if that made any sense. Good luck.

[jonathan lall]

I will reserve any real critiquing until there is more to see, although I am bit confused as to why you decided to redesign an already nice site; you have one of the nicer team sites I've seen in FIRST.

Anyway, I'll try to keep this to an aesthetic degree rather than actual coding methods for now as I understand this is a preliminary version. At this point, I must say that the 'old' site is quite a bit nicer IMO. May I suggest changing the font to a sans-serif such as Arial (be sure to include "sans-serif" as a backup)? The layout and the font don't seem to agree. I did a quick test and found that a sans-serif font that was a bit smaller than the default looked pretty decent with the general layout.

For this site, I would urge you to use a minimal stylesheet for simple but common things. The addition of the aformentioned two font rules to the body element helped a lot universally. You can use this also to define the colours and rollover effects of your links, especially in the navbar.

In all, a good start; PM me if you'd like some more thoughts or help.

[iBob]

Thank you for the good feedback. I'm going to be changing the alignment of the left navigation to centered i believe... and also addign a stylesheet that will include rollovers. Thanks for the feedback and keep it coming.

P.S. I'm glad you like the old site. I would keep it but there are many reasons to change. The most important being 56k users. Downloading all those images for the design part is far to slow for my taste. I have other reasons too but I also like changing things up. Experience is good

[iBob]

Ok, I added a stylesheet. What do you think? I'm not very experienced t stylesheets (in facti basically just now figured it out). Please give suggestions, and if you have a good idea for the stylesheet please give me a little help with what you mean becuase i don't have much idea. Thanks!

http://www.nuge.com/~christopher/robotics/about.html

[jonathan lall]

Ten times better already! You don't need an extensive stylesheet, and in fact what you have is pretty good. I would leave it at that!

[David Kelly]

Originally Posted by iBob

Ok, I added a stylesheet. What do you think? I'm not very experienced t stylesheets (in facti basically just now figured it out). Please give suggestions, and if you have a good idea for the stylesheet please give me a little help with what you mean becuase i don't have much idea. Thanks!

http://www.nuge.com/~christopher/robotics/about.html

its lookin pretty cool

[Greg]

And also, dont forget to create either an index.html page with an intro or modify htaccess to redirect to news.html (or rename it to index). Displaying a directory listing to users who enter the site by typing just http://www.nuge.com/~christopher/robotics/ is not a good idea

[iBob]

Originally Posted by Greg

And also, dont forget to create either an index.html page with an intro or modify htaccess to redirect to news.html (or rename it to index). Displaying a directory listing to users who enter the site by typing just http://www.nuge.com/~christopher/robotics/ is not a good idea

The nuge.com is my personal webspace I'm using as a test site right now. There will be an intro page I jsut haven't had time to throw it together yet. I'm glad you like the stylesheet... keep the comments coming.

[robot180]

I have a suggestion that you might think about, but it doesn't mean you should definitely do it. Take a look at your site. Pretend you are some old lady that does not know what a robot is and somehow ends up at your website. They have to know exactly what your site is for without much reading. Making some type of visualization on the home page may help. You could try putting a picture of your robot. Now you have to remember that this old lady probably isn't paying a lot of money and is getting an extremely slow, cheep internet connection through the slowest modem on the market. You should make the picture a sort of small thumbrail type pic that they can click on if they want the full sized image. This will help them to quickly learn what all this talk about robots has to do with the team mentioned in the website.

[iBob]

hmm interesting take on design. I'll keep that in mind as I make the next round of revisions. Thanks.

[jonathan lall]

I originally figured you were aware of this and just ignoring it for now, but now I see why you wouldn't be; in resolutions above 1024 x 768 (which I run in), the top blue header splits apart into the seperate images it is made up of. I think you're going to want to fix that.

[robot180]

If we are talking about the same thing, it does split on mine.

[evulish]

I have the same problem with blue title bar in both IE and Opera.

Also, your page is very 'edgy' (like the edges are nice and sharp). I think if justifying the text alignment in your paragraphs would make it look nicer. It would make it fit with the 'sharp' design. You can do this with either the <p align="justify"> or in your stylesheet p {text-align:justify}. Just my two cents.. Good job, though

[charlie_grr]

just the basics, a style sheet, and white text on a black background is hard on the eyes when you look at it for a while. but besides that, good job