Critique this design, please

[Roland]

I've been doing some work on my new team's site and want the opinion of people who haven't been staring at it for hours. So check it out and tell me what you think.

[Max Lobovsky]

It's nice and clean, but maybe not what you'd expect when looking at a robotics website. I believe the 2004 website rubric actually gave some point for the style "being appropriate for a robotics website" or something along those lines. Perhaps its the serif-ed title or the sort of pastel color scheme. Not edgy enough to be a technology related.

[Ryan F.]

Welcome to Webb Robotics

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Proin diam est, blandit vitae, sodales quis, cursus nec, odio. Vivamus quis justo sit amet leo ultrices porta. Aenean dapibus ipsum sagittis odio. Aliquam at dui sit amet odio imperdiet mollis. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Nunc elit sem, iaculis a.

Dolor hendrerit magna, nec blandit augue sapien porta nibh. Vivamus vel massa at urna posuere adipiscing. Integer adipiscing, nisl nec venenatis hendrerit, quam lectus malesuada quam, eget ultrices mi leo a tellus. Suspendisse potenti. Vestibulum iaculis lacus scelerisque leo. Morbi id nulla. Maecenas elit. Phasellus eget nulla.

Location: Knoxville, TN


Either it's me.....or something is wrong language wise here.
^^Nevermind...I didn't know about the lipsum thing he used.


On the other hand, I really like the design. The biggest thing I look for in a website is it being clean, and yours did a great job at it. It looks very professional just using the simple background/theme you did.

[Roland]

Originally Posted by Max Lobovsky

It's nice and clean, but maybe not what you'd expect when looking at a robotics website. I believe the 2004 website rubric actually gave some point for the style "being appropriate for a robotics website" or something along those lines. Perhaps its the serif-ed title or the sort of pastel color scheme. Not edgy enough to be a technology related.

I understand what you mean about the pastels maybe not being quite right. However, the logo will definitely stay: it's done that way to match our school's logo.




And Ryan: check out lipsum.com.

[Adam Y.]

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Proin diam est, blandit vitae, sodales quis, cursus nec, odio. Vivamus quis justo sit amet leo ultrices porta. Aenean dapibus ipsum sagittis odio. Aliquam at dui sit amet odio imperdiet mollis. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Nunc elit sem, iaculis a.

Hey Im not really sure but I have seen this same thing in a book and on other websites. Now if I only knew what it meant.

[Roland]

^^^ again, look at lipsum.com.

[ahecht]

Very nice. Sizing it down to 640x480 doesn't break the page (although smaller than that does), and I don't see any major problems. I also like the text-based navigation.


Other that it not being "robotic" enough, the only issue I see is that you might want to swap which side the salmon banner is on, as thin columns on the right side are often assumed to be ads and ignored. You also might not want to have your email there in plain text -- a simple javascript email obfuscator such as this one would work, but a CGI mailto script would probably be better (click the Zan Hecht link in my sig for an example).

Oh, and your signature may be legal, but it's still really annoying (and not gracously professional).

[J Flex 188]

Perhaps, but i had a pretty good chuckle at the sig.. at least it pokes fun at something.

I personally like the pastel style, and I dont really see how anyone can define being enough of a "robotics" look. You have a picture of a robot, as well as the FIRST logo. The site doesnt necessarily have to appeal right away to web site judging guidelines, no? Just building a site for your team is a good enough accomplishment to serve to inform and let people know about your team and FIRST is enough for me. If you want to make the site the best it can be and tailor it to the criteria =) by all means.

[Joe Matt]

It's jarring to see the pastel green, but if you want to keep it, then that's cool too. Nothing much else I can judge right now, but otherwise it looks good.

[pakrat]

Other than not being able to read it, it looks really good to me. I think that its just fine for being a robotics web page, you should have whatever style you want.

[PCole]

Looks good to me.. the colors are a little different, but in many ways different can be good

Looks good

[Max Lobovsky]

I was wrong about FIRST requiring a robotics-y look. The part of the rubric I was referring to is:

 Does the website communicate a visual experience reflective of the team identity?
 Does the website communicate a visual experience reflective of the mission of FIRST?

[Roland]

Originally Posted by Max Lobovsky

I was wrong about FIRST requiring a robotics-y look.

Good, because among FIRST-related sites ugly color schemes seem to be the rule rather than the exception and I wouldn't want FIRST to be in any way endorsing that kind of crap.

[MrToast]

Perhaps this is me and my minimalist attitude when it comes towards websites, but if that's going to be your main page... Personally, I think it's WAY too much text to be assaulted with on a main page. A good home page is one that I can glance at and INSTANTLY know what the page is about. So simple things, like a <H1> title, and a picture (preferably somewhat large) of something like your robot would be a good introduction. Once people have the basic idea of what the site is about, lead them away with a little navigation bar or something (same bar should be on every page of the site), and they can use THAT to get to the gobs and gobs of text. It's a much more user-friendly way to go about it. Give them a tease with the intro, then once they decide to want to see more, that's when you hit them with the Latin.

Oh, and about that green, if you're going to keep it, don't use that brown. They clash.

MrToast

[JohnBoucher]

Nice... Very nice.
I like that the colors and look are not traditional. All of our robots are different, so should be our web sites.

I like that you tell us upfront where your team is located. On some sites you have to look to tell where the team is from.

A general comment for all on color selections. There are studies about color blindness in the population. It is estimated that 7% of the male population is red/green color blind to some degree. Interestingly enough it is limited to males, with only .4% of the female population being affected.
There are web sites to test this out. This is one colorfilter There are others, just Google for them. Your site, being green dependent, works well with the color filters applied.

It's great to see that your page validates both to the Wc3 standards for HTML and css. I wish more teams would take this step and clean up their code.

I would rethink your use of the first logo. Their guidelines can be found here. It is a registered trademark now, so there are new guidelines to follow.
You can submit your logo changes to them for approval.

I am always concerned about right hand columns and how they print. The page prints well.

I am a believer in keyword and description meta tags. I don't see any in your code. If you don't believe that they help the search engines, their value is in getting you to think about your site. They force you to focus on the page content.

I peeked at your code and then your css file because I saw that you use the h1 tag more than once. You define the h1 tag three different ways. It is better to reserve the h1 tag for the single most important element on the page. Use the h tags to define the order of the important elements on your page. The H tags are not just for styles, they have relevance to the search engines.

jb