Another review request...

[essellar]

The bones of my personal site can be found at stanrogers.x10hosting.com.

I am not after "good job". I want hard, honest feedback concerning usability, readability, contrast, font size and face (as they relate to your ability to read the site), sensibility of navigation so far, and so on. If it sucks, tell me it sucks -- but also tell me why it sucks, what browser it sucks in, and so on.

Thanks large. -- Stan

 

[cybrax]

Allright Stan,

It does have a washed out fuzzy apperence, the heavy shadow in the content box border and the wood effect divider are both guilty of this. Secondly those white lines do distract they eye, the hard transition making the blurring more pronouced than it is.

Reams of text have been written about colour theory and website design, but few ever read them so instead take a look at http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/ and see what happens when design goes horribbly wrong. Lack of text contrast appears to have been a recurring theme for 2009


Good to see css3 elements being employed, why not use them to make the site logo text as well?
Remember that non standard fonts can be embedded into a web page and most newer browsers support the feature.

There is really no need to include disclaimers and other terms & conditions at the foot of each page, a basic link to a seperate page is all you really need.

T&C, Sitemap, Contact, Copyright Notice, Designed by etc are common footer links for most web sites.


Browsershots.org will show you what your site looks like to others. Its a free online service and takes around thirty minutes. The list of browsers it tests your site with is extensive and to speed things up just tick IE 6,7,8 - FireFox - Safari - Chrome.

 

[essellar]

Thanks -- that's the sort of feedback I was looking for. I've been out of the game, really, since my stroke about five years ago, and that's what, about four centuries in web time? As an aside, I see things in higher contrast than most people do -- I have to push my paintings and drawings to a point that looks harsh, almost painful, to me before things stop looking faded to other people, so I really did need the contrast assessment from someone else's eyes. You'd get a decent approximation if you loaded a screenshot into your favorite image editor and cranked the contrast up by about 50%.

And the logo? Jaggies made the decision for me. Safari on Windows rendered the type well, but there were staircases everywhere else I looked.

 

[cybrax]

Don't worry to much about being out of the loop, the race is starting again. with the next wave of browsers set to support more css3 and google now ranking pages by loading times. So a lot of the heavily arty designs are being binned by designers.

Just ask in here for somebody to look your artwork over and lets see if we can re-calibrate your artistic eye a little, but not the way you think..

Remember...
Accesability features for those with visual impairments is the next stage of web design evolution and several groups are pushing for them to become mandatory on all commercial web sites. Such as the ability of the visitor to alter both font size and colour scheme to improve contrast.

Both font size & text colour can be altered on-the-fly by the visitor with ready made cut & paste javavscript routines and google search should turn up several links to them. Normallly these just alter the css as it relates to the text, however there is a less well used command in the css library namely "Opacity". Using the same javascript that alters font properties you should be able to tinker with images appearence dynamically as well. So no matter who visits the web page it can render well enough for all to see.

Don't change the way you paint to much, just treat those with 20/20 vision as the 'disabled' who need help to see your work and code for them accordingly. Applying opacity directly to a single image is not going to work to well, but overlapping images might ...

Stan, you have given me something to think about.. find a medium size image say 500x500px and tweek the contrast so it looks ok for you then post that and the original up here.

Best regards
Jon,Julie & Bishop the dog