Here is the website that we submitted for competition this year.
The entire website is written by hand using php, sql, css, html, javascript, etc.
It has a Fully made by us Content Management System (page editor, image manager, etc). It also has animated drop down links and dynamic page loading system. (pages load without having to reload the whole page). It is also valid CSS 3 and HTML 4.01 trans
so, what do you like/dislike about it?
Looks great. I love the logo. Site is visually balanced and easy to navigate.
I like to see onmouseover action for menus. It’s a usability thing that I find important.
It’s hard to tell where you are from. I would add that to the header. You have the real-estate for it.
I am very intrigued by the Site powered by 100% wind energy, but there is no link for that. Tells us more about that. The website judges will be interested.
Thanks for the feedback! I added a link to the green energy logo, and by adding to the header to you mean to the actual banner at the top or to the title on the homepage? I added it to the title for now.
I would add the address to the actual header. Adding it there seemed to move the middle content box up.
I have concerns about the sidebar, it looks a little weird. Part of this is the gradient, and making the sidebar more “flat” helps.
We can finish this off by removing the “fake” borders and adding real ones (giving us consistency), as well as lightning them a little.
I’m more concerned though about the behaviour of the sidebar, as whenever you open a section below an already open section, your cursor ends up in a “random” place (yes, I know it’s not really random, but it may as well be for the user). As an example, open the “The Team” section, then try to view a page under “The Game”.
Their are many ways to fix this, one of which is to allow the user to open as many sections as they like permanently, another is to keep sections other then the active one open “temporarily” and close the temporary ones on mouseOut. This would leave the active one open, the one the user is most likely using, and remove the inactive ones from focus.
Another issue I have is with your page loading. I like to open multiple things in tabs, and then look through them. Under your system, this is broken, as the pages are loaded using an onClick. I would suggest using hashes (http://wildcatrobotics.com/#home or http://wildcatrobotics.com/#team_students) with javascript that, on the pageload, gets the specified page.
This seems like a lot of things, but they’re mostly pretty minor changes. The content looks AMAZING and the site overall looks great. The sidebar was just the only thing that caught my eye design wise and hardest change would probably be the sidebar open/close issue, which isn’t saying much.