Critique

[Matt Adams]

I gotta confess that I had a lot of trouble with website design. I think that with an engineering background, I was pretty good at organizing data, but presentation is another matter. The fundamental idea of a website being very square and rigid has a lot of great applications.

I have one question and a seperate thought for you:

1. You want a clean design with few graphics so that the page loads quickly. This is always the ideal, but many small graphics can add curves and smooth out an otherwise boxy website. Is slow bandwidth for your audience a truly terrible plight? Would adding 100k of graphics ruin their experience to your website?

2. Unify a color scheme.
I noticed that you have 5 contrasting colors. If you take a look at many websites, they typically have some sort of a unified color scheme. Colors can be used to relay important information or direct the users attention, but using a rainbow is sometimes distracting and could leave users overwhelmed.

Here are a couple of websites that make descent use of color themes, and illustrate my point, some are obviously better than others.

http://csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/164/164.css&page=0

http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile...css/eyedea.css

http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile...m/zen/zen1.css

http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile...szg/sample.css

Anyway, pick some colors that seem to go well together and pick a scheme, then organize the information well.

Also, I can recommend a great book that I think evey web designer should own: Don't Make Me Think! It's not so much on design, but helping designers understand how people use webpages. VERY insightful and highly recommended.

Good luck!

Matt