HiveMinds

Michelle · Posted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 7:11 am Post subject: School Site

I'm not finished with this site, but it's looking really lame to me. I'd love to have some feedback / suggestions before I go much further with it.

The current mock up is at http://couldntgetagoodname.com/ecs/colors.html

Please let me know of any ideas to improve the layout.

Thanks!
Michelle

ljmyers · Posted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 8:11 am Post subject:

Michelle,

I only have a small fraction of the experience most of the members here do but for what it's worth I have a few humble thoughts.

1 - I think the site views fine from a user's standpoint. The only thing I might do is change the background color to white.

2 - The logo.jpg width="504" height="100" I would do away with and use html (h1, h2, etc.) text and a similar background color as the image has using tables, not only cutting down on your load time but creating a little SEO optimization.

3 - The macromedia flash thing with the photos took a wee bit of time to load on my pc and I have a high speed cable connection. Alot of people with dial-up may not want to wait on it, therefore clicking onto the next web site before they have even completely viewed your site. My thought is to use a script to display the photos via thumbnail on another page entitled "See Us In Action" or something catchy and possibly along with a "small" and interesting image link to click on including the alt="Christian School in Atlanta, Georgia excepting 2 to 18 years old" to not only draw the users attention but optimize from an SEO stand point.

Just an FYI
Your site's Mozilla Web-Page Speed Report . . .

Download Times*
Connection Rate Download Time
14.4K 556.57 seconds
28.8K 278.29 seconds
33.6K 238.53 seconds
56K 143.12 seconds
ISDN 128K 43.83 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps 3.80 seconds

As I said, just my thoughts and keeping in mind, the longer the load time, the less # of users.

Smiles,
Lana
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Michelle · Posted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 9:11 am Post subject:

Thanks, Lana. You think the overall design is fine though? I was thinking that maybe I should just scrap the whole thing and start over.

I'm heading out of town for the weekend, so I apologize in advance if anyone replies and I don't respond back until tuesday. I'm taking the kids camping. Smile

ljmyers · Posted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 9:32 am Post subject:

I do think it's fine. It's colorful - in my opinion anyway - as a school site should be but not so bright or colorful that it looks tacky. It gets to the point in a simple and direct way without adding too much info and flooding the page for the user to get lost in.

But if you're like me, you will make 500 more changes until you get just what you want.

Camping, one of the things I enjoy most. My ljmyerscompany site has a few pages devoted to camping in West Virginia with pics and such. We go as often as we can, whether it's tent camping or hooking up the camper.
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Prayer is asking for rain. Faith is taking along an umbrella.
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caddickj · Posted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 10:59 am Post subject:

I don't know if my connection was horrible or what, but that loaded REEEEAL slow. Especially the flash bit. Over 3 minutes. And I'm at work with a T-1 line (though the routers are not the most reliable).

Anyway... for the design. I actually think it looks nice. I'd make the LEARN MORE links a little more prevalent, I think, and put a break before each of them.

It might be nice to see the three main photos flip (very slowly) to alternates as a mini-slide show.

The header should be the same height all the way across. The flash portion is a bit smaller.

I'd also like it better with no spaces between the graphic and the flash bit.

Maybe on rollover the colored sections could brighten a little. Not much, just subtlely.

The text seemed a little small. Until I increased the font size, I couldn't tell what was bold and what wasn't.

Take the first comma out of the first sentence. (I know that's not the feedback you were looking for, but it bugged me.)

The other thing that made me think twice was that it is a fixed width site. Those bug me. It seems fine for this page, but I imagine that other pages will have more content, and I'd like to be able to use my whole screen, not just the center third.

Really, though, I like it.
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chlucy · Dances with Penguins Joined: 08 Nov 2002 Posts: 1564

Load time seemed fine for me (cable modem). I like the blue background (and the color scheme overall) but the red title seems a bit jarring. I think it might be nice in a shade of blue (disclaimer: blue is my favorite color) like navy or the one used for the Preschool block on the right. The text is a bit small but I can read everything and I'm on a Mac so sometimes font sizes are a bit off.

Michelle · Posted: Tue Jul 19, 2005 2:58 am Post subject:

Thank you for the suggestions! I still have a lot of work left to do on the site, but I've already taken many of your suggestions and can see that it's now headed in the right direction. I'm glad I didn't have to start over.

I also noticed that the flash thing was taking forever to load, so I'm going to redo it once I get the rest of the design down.

Thank you!
Michelle

SoopahMan · Posted: Tue Aug 16, 2005 12:25 am Post subject:

The 3 call out boxes destined for I believe the right side of the homepage end up running down the bottom in Firefox 1.0.6 on my machine.

The Boy Hope · Posted: Tue Aug 16, 2005 3:31 am Post subject:

I get the same thing as Soop.

Firefox Screenshot

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Michelle · Posted: Tue Aug 16, 2005 9:38 pm Post subject:

Yeah, I noticed that too. I had been working on some other things the last few weeks, but I was just thinking today that I should finish up that site. You think the problem might be the difference in the way ie and firefox interpret padding's effect on overall width? I guess I'd better work on it.

There's something about the look of the site that really irritates me. I think it may be the colors, even though they do a good job of representing the type of school that it is. I think I've been putting off working on it because I don't like to look at it.

I appreciate you looking at it and telling me about the problem you saw.

Michelle

SoopahMan · Posted: Mon Aug 22, 2005 2:01 am Post subject:

Ah - you're throwing Moz a curveball by doing this:

Michelle · Posted: Mon Aug 22, 2005 12:36 pm Post subject:

Thanks, Soopah! Can you teach me the hack as well?

SoopahMan · Posted: Mon Aug 29, 2005 1:05 pm Post subject:

OK fine ;o) I dislike teaching CSS hacks because of what I've seen people do with them. Say this aloud to your computer screen first: