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Website feedback requested for one of my projects

Started by dchakrab, July 19, 2006, 04:47:17 PM

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dchakrab

Hi all,

Figured I'd ask for some feedback here. I'm tossing around ideas for a site design I'm donating to the Burma Solidarity Network. Since they don't have a test site up (working with an inexperienced programmer), I'm building ideas into their current site, which is live but has no membership / traffic / exposure yet.

Here's the site: Burma Solidarity Network. The idea is that eventually Burmese refugees and others will be able to log in, create their own user groups, have their own group home pages with private content, etc. It's meant to be a resource for the international community of Burmese.

What do you guys think? Needs the header image optimized if I stay with it, so apologies in advance for any slow load times.

Thanks in advance,

  Dave.
Dave's Blog on community technology, Drupal, website development, and nonprofit SEO.

Project Manager at the Chicago Technology Coop, focusing on nonprofit web development.

haunter

looks really nice, the darker orange text is just a bit hard to read when its in the darker parts of the background
82 with fairing, rejetted, 83 turbo seca fork and brakes coming whenver I acquire the rest of the parts, and she stops breaking long enough to be in the garage for an upgrade instead of a repair.

Extent

Neat, I do like the bg image for the body div.

I can be brutal and nit-picky with my feedback if you'ld like.  Just don't like doing it unsolicited, people get offended way too easily :D
Rider1>No wonder, the Daytona has very sharp steering and aggressive geometry.  It's a very difficult bike for a new rider.
Rider2>Well it has different geometry now.

dchakrab

By all means, be brutal. I have a thick skin, and know nothing about design, so this is a complete learning process for me. I normall set up the CMS backends for stuff like this, not tinker so much with custom design work.

Text: Yeah...they haven't worked out what colors they want to go with, so that'll definitely change.

I like the idea of using background images that either fade into transparency or have a tranlucent effect with text overlaid...it's something that will work better when I actually know something about color theory and design elements, of course.

  Dave.
Dave's Blog on community technology, Drupal, website development, and nonprofit SEO.

Project Manager at the Chicago Technology Coop, focusing on nonprofit web development.

Extent

Alrighty then

I like the contents of the two photos, but they seem a little muddy, like they're over compressed or grainy or something, can't quite put my finger on it.  It would be nice to find different photos with better clarity, particularly for the header image.  Also the current header feels a little dark and under exposed.

You should take the site title ("Burma Solidarity Network") and give it a nice text treatment and bake it into the header image.  That'll let you have nicely AA'd lettering, and give you a chance to back the letters to make them pop from the background more (and please, for the love of God, don't use a drop shadow :p )

Is the blue icon the groups logo?  If not change it to something else.  If it is then you may want to consider using a blue and white theme for the rest of the site.

The mouse over arrows on the "test" blog post are out of line with the rest of the items in that collumn.

The "more" link in the same place overlaps the mouse over arrows.  You may consider left aligning it and making it longer (more like "Read older entries") to make it fit in a little better.  Right now it's the only thing hanging off to the right side of tha collumn.

The CC notice is a little tacky, no need for it to be so obtrusive and in the main navigation.  Ditch the image and make the notice a plain text link in the page footer, similar to the copyright notices used in many forum packages, including this site (ROV).

In the same vein the "Website Design" box is pretty obtrusive.  Visually I like it, with the transparent gradient box, but the text should be no larger than the text in the body of the site, and idealy I would make it 2 pts or so smaller, and in line with the copyright notice in the footer.  Make sure that your name is a link to your personal site, or the site of your webdesign business if you have one.

I would put more trailing space after each major subsection in your main navigation.  The "recent blog posts" line is crowding on the "groups" link a little bit.  I would also either remove the bullets from the "blog posts" section, or add them to all the main links, again to give it a more unified look.  If you want the blog posts to be visually different from your main navigation maybe try putting them in a table with a different background color, or otherwise box them in to make a more definite seperation from the rest of the column.

I don't know what the "syndicate" group is doing, but it's way far away from the rest of the content of that collumn, bring it up in line with the rest of the sub categories so it dosen't look like it's falling off the page.

You have HRs between each of your nav links, but they're barely discernable from the background color.  Make them either lighter or darker for more contrast with the background, or get rid of them all together.

The "community" link is redundant with the "community" link that's in the groups page.  If the groups page will just list groups that are already listed in your main navigation I would get rid of it.

The table in the groups page feels a little clostrophobic, especially on the left side.  I'ld stretch it out a little bit and give the text some room to breathe.

The white line that seperates the first two collumns is nice, but it should never be shorter than the contents of your first collumn otherwise it looks kind of like it wants to spill out into the rest of the page.  Also maybe try the same line on the right side of the center collumn, to better define that border.

Clicking the "home" links (in main nav and in the header) take you to a different page than clicking the "welcome" text in the main title.  When you click the welcome text it un-linkifies itsself and also displays your location and the "login or register" line.  Keep that layout and make the other two links display that as well.

The row of links you have just under the header ( Home | test | Contact ) seems redundant as well.  Roll the Contact link into your main navigation column and just remove that line altogether.

The user login box on the right is overly large.  I would remove it entirely and instead place a single link to a dedicated login page, keep your account maintainance links on that page as well, then you'll be able to reclaim all of that space on the right for something more usefull.  You also do not need the * denoting required fields on the login form.  That is fairly obvious and just lends to page clutter.  I would also make your failure page seperate.  Right now it just loads login failure notices ontop of whatever section of the site your in.  Again that portion of the page just becomes extra clutter, since the information you are trying to get across is that of the login failure.

That's all I can think of for now, I only briefly looked at the page code that's being generated and only saw a couple empty tags, but page optimization really is a last step anyway.
Rider1>No wonder, the Daytona has very sharp steering and aggressive geometry.  It's a very difficult bike for a new rider.
Rider2>Well it has different geometry now.

glennw

Extent...
Remind me to have you look over my V next CROV run.... :-\
Just kidding... ;)
Glenn
Half Mad Max

dchakrab

Thanks, Extent...much appreciated.

My problem is that I'm just supposed to mess with the design. So I build a design, ask them what they want, and their "programmer" decides to enable the "recent blog posts" module because he thinks it'll be cool. He doesn't have a lot of experience (and none with the Drupal CMS, or with community based website development in general), so I'm not sure how to deal with the problem, other than to keep offering advice till he gets offended.

This is intended to be a community site...i.e., eventually a ton of users will be hitting the site, logging in, and checking out their groups. This is an argument in favor of the login box on the main page.

The Creative Commons license on the left column wasn't my idea either...the site maintainer decided to stick that there after taking the code out of the footer, where I'd placed it. I agree with you entirely on its placement; the footer is where it belongs.

Top horizontal nav (home, test, contact) is again something that they've been adding links to, and I was asked specifically to create a main navigation menu that would run horizontally across the page, so that's what I added. I like putting all navigation into columns, usually. It's up to them...easy enough to disable through the Drupal system if they end up agreeing with me on that.

Horizontal divisions: You're right...they've become invisible. To tell you the truth, I must have forgotten they were there while messing with the CSS, and was just too sleepy to notice / clean it afterwards.

Photographs: I don't have high-res versions yet...the photographer indicated he'd be willing to allow us to use some of his work, but he wants to see the design they'd go into first. So this is a mockup; presumably he'll provide me with higher res versions once he's seen this, so I can replace the images. They'll most likely be the same images, but sharper.

Blue icon: Leftover from a Drupal theme. I'll replace it with theirs, if they create one. Otherwise, it'll either go away or I'll think of something to stick there.

Mouseovers in Nav + the "more" link: Again, agreed. I'll fix it if they decide to keep the "Recent Blog Posts" block at all. Otherwise, I don't want to encourage a model where they keep changing stuff at random and I try to keep up with good design for the site. They need to give me a final idea of what's going to appear on the site, and I'll finish up the design work at that point to make sure it's clean and stuff like that is fixed. This is a freebie; I definitely don't want to be in a position where I'm Mr. Permanent Drupal Consultant.

Syndicate: There's an empty block above it (sigh). I really need to tell them again to use a test site for this kind of thing, but I think they'll keep experimenting on this one anyway, just to see what cool stuff they can do. A CMS in the hands of the uninitiated is a terrible thing.

Community link: Again, not my idea, and not something I'll have control over. I can point out the redundancy, but if they decide they want to keep it, it's their navigation bar.

"Home" vs. "welcome" ...I disagree with you on this. I don't think the other links should take you into the "welcome" page (with the location displayed, etc). The front page is (eventually) going to contain recent content (blog style), announcements, calendared events, etc. The welcome text is just one piece of content, posted blog style to the front page as a placeholder for the time being. So eventually, that could become a longer piece of welcoming text, or just be a non-linked welcome message, but the front page will be very dynamic, hopefully drawing a lot of return traffic from registered users. So, given that, it seems practical to let the Drupal system generate all of that onto the main front page for the site, and let individual pages (like the welcome page) act only as static content pages, when necessary.

Tables: This can be changed, once I know which direction this site is moving in. It doesn't bother me much, but some more space wouldn't hurt either.

White divider line: Sure, that can change. It's currently a border-left in the CSS for the main container...switching to a border-right for the left nav column is easy. This'll produce the opposite effect when the central text is longer than the nav bar, though...but this can be worked around in other ways.

"Website design by": Yeah, I agree with you. I was playing around with effects to see if that'd work as a cool site credit space. I'll redo it so the text is actual text placed in the right spot with CSS, and then link it back to one of my sites, or to the design group that I'll be a part of from September onwards. I usually do stuff like that last.

Good comments, though frustrating, since a lot of the things I agree with you on I don't have direct control over. The guy who's going to be maintaining this site as the main programmer was never trained in documenting code, or in working with other people on a project; he started out by deleting all the commented in-line documentation for the config files and just hard-coded in the template he wanted to use, etc. This, of course, meant that Drupal's built-in theme selection options all crashed. I'm not sure he understands why this upset me...it's very hard to work with programmers like that. Not his fault, of course...he's very dedicated and committed to the project and to working with Burmese refugees. It's just that there are some things Indian training institutions are *terrible* at, and one of them is this kind of programming. Too much emphasis on getting resume buzzwords down so you can get outsourcing contracts and not any emphasis on producing what the rest of the world considers a quality software product.

Oh well, </rant>. Thanks! I'll tinker with this some more when I've got some free time.

  Dave.

Dave's Blog on community technology, Drupal, website development, and nonprofit SEO.

Project Manager at the Chicago Technology Coop, focusing on nonprofit web development.

Extent

Ya if you're not the coder too that makes things a bit more difficult, I've always just done everything myself so I've never had to deal with that, heh.

As always it's entirely up to you to decide what you want to do with it ( or what you can do with it, as the case may be )  My opinions are entirely that, and aren't really anything but personal design philosophy.  I only took a handfull of design courses before dropping out of college, and only one of those (User Interface design I) was directly web related.

Good luck!

Quote from: glennw on July 20, 2006, 02:49:48 PM
Remind me to have you look over my V next CROV run.... :-\

Heh, if only I could be as thorough with my bike as I am when critiquing media.... ::)
Rider1>No wonder, the Daytona has very sharp steering and aggressive geometry.  It's a very difficult bike for a new rider.
Rider2>Well it has different geometry now.

glennw

Extent...I know dude.. 
CNN would tear my bike apart..
Like that d*p sh*t Nader did with my Import EATING.. KICK ASS Corvair way back when..
You see I've ALWAYS liked the ODDBALLS..
NOW....Fox would say I'm cool..
See you in September with CROV I hope..
Glenn..
Half Mad Max