Please review my site...

[amrithnayak]

Hi Everyone!

I have recently started a website for an Address Book program I designed, as a school-related computer project. The website is supposed to be an online software-license manager for the program, and also contains documentation for the program, as well as a download link.

Most of the site is locked if you are unregistered, so to access those parts of the site, I made a dummy user-account that anyone can use to see what the site's all about...

Username: anonymous
Password: password

This is only the third site that I have designed, so it might not be that nice, and it may render differently in some browsers, as I haven't been able to test it on all browsers.
Could anyone please review the site?

http://alm.amcre.x10hosting.com

Thanks for your patience

 

[greatm]

Overall the appearance looks fairly clean. I didn't dig to deep into the code, so I am unsure whether something was supposed to be in the large block right below he navigation ba. That block is fairly distracting tot he rest of the site in my opinion, and either needs some sort of content or to have its height reduced considerably.

I only had a few thigns that popped out at as things to change. The first two involve your naivgation bar and really are just aesthetics for the most part.

1. Your navigation bar dances as you hover over the various links, though it only dances a little. I find this ditstracting since when you hover all of the following links jump to the side a bit, though as I said you only have a minor issue with this so you don't have a problem where a link jumps out from uder the mouse. Still, it is rather annoying and usually easy to fix by playing with the width until it doesn't jump at all.

2. Even after you log in, the sign-in and register links are at the top. I would use a php if statement to check to see if a session variable is set and at leastswitch the log-in button to a log-out button. You have the log-in and register buttons at the bottom anyqays, so if someone wanted to simply switch to a different acount without logging out they could do so there. This is just an aesthetic thing, so it isn't overly important.

The phone number at the top is nice, but it breaks the contained appearance and depending on whether you use the compatibility view in ie8 or not, it will align all the way to the right which is pretty bad looking on higher widescreen resolutions. (I view it at 1600x900 and in compatibility mode it is so far to the right that it looks like the scroll bar is trying to cover it up and in both views it is outside the apparent container the rest of the site is in. That might be the appearance you were going for, but it might just be a resolution error.

The last thing I noticed was the phone number itself. I would reccomend that you break the phone number up into the 3 and 4 digit long blocks by adding in dashes or periods between the different parts of the number since most people's minds view and comprehend numbers more efficiently in groups of 3 and 4, and anything larger than a segment of 7 numbers is harder for most people to remember.

i.e;
8005551234
- compared to-
800.555.1234
-or-
800-555-1234

I personally like periods since they still visually seperate the numbers while taking up less space unless your font has each character take up the same amount of space as each other character, and still being easily understood as being a phone number.

As I said before, the site looks fairly nice and clean, and the things I noteded were mostly just aesthetics, and little things that tend to bug me and people I know. I suppose the thing I view as the worst thing is the pure white background since it makes everything seem so harsh and strong. I personally would have a slightly, just barely perceptible shift to an off-white color. Not even as much as you main body area with the information in it, just to soften the appearance a touch.

Hope this helps,
greatm

 

[amrithnayak]

>> Hope this helps,
greatm

Thank you so much for that review! It did help I made a few of the changes you mentioned in your post, like changing the background to an off-white color, and adjusting the menu so that it won't flicker anymore... I even changed the menu, like you said, and I agree, it does make a difference

I'm still working on fixing the phone-number bar at the top...

Anyway, here's the updated site:
http://www.alm.amcre.x10hosting.com

Thanks again

 

[techfun]

Good site with good design, i will post a detailed review later.

 

[greatm]

No problem, though if you look at the sign-in and sign-out links, they wrap around and overlap/underlap the section below them depending on whether compatability mode is used. The rest of your changes look great and the slightly off white takes off enough of the sharp contrast to ease the appearance and give the site a softer appearance.

As for your phone number, since it is an image it should be easy to manipulate. I'd try changing how you position it using your CSS style since that is what is probably throwing it out to the side.

 

[Gouri]

One word. Very much professional. I like it.

From logo to the end footer. Everything. Just add content.

Good luck

 

[miguelkp]

I maybe feel a bit lack of color in the navigation bar. But anyway it looks consistent and homogeneous (a lot of people 'forget' one of the most important rules on web design: homogeneity). And it's always good to see a webpage with BoW texts (Black on White) XD

 

[playminigames]

yes, probably one of the most professional looking sites ive seen on x10, great job, just add more content!