Know-How Exchange : Website Critique

Thanks Jay for your reply.

I have tried to implement a "free resources" section and a "premium content" section on the home page.

Would be curious to hear any other comments you might have.

Doug

Natasha,

Can you be more specific as to what you do not like about the site.

I have received nothing but good reviews for the "new" layout . People say it is less cluttered and simpler than the "first" version.

Also, the site is designed to be a resource center where information can be easily accessed.

ie; color scheme, layout, font choice, etc.

Doug

Pour vous servir

There is not a unified design neither in typography (at least 4 different fonts are used in different elements) nor in color scheme.

Pretty nice header, which was obviously created by someone who has not been maintaining or updating the website lately. The header shows a professional approach and gives a hint about what initial look of the website was supposed to be. Looks like the template for the project was created by a designer, but when coding got into action, here design has ended and never was restored.

As I have said, header is pretty well drawn, but it’s not coded properly. Modern web design says that actual text should be used wherever it’s possible. If some non-usual fonts are used in headers and decoration of the web project, replacements with graphics are allowed, but it’s well known that all text containing graphics should be presented as gif files. Another rule concerning it is that the image itself should be as small as possible being cut along the edges of the text field. Basically, your header should have being cut this way: https://www.artographica.com/clients/thedesignersinnercircle/portallogo.gif after which the green gradient background should have being used. Instead of 6 kb nice clean gif you have a 34 kb jpeg with some dirt around the letters. There is also a weird white vertical line on the right side of the green header. I assume it’s a coding problem, perhaps a pixel width cell in the main table.

Your nice background was not meant to be used for pages with so much information, therefore you may see how it’s repeating vertically basically destroying the initial idea of a nice gradient, showing a rough edge between the white end and black beginning of the next background cycle.

Header is using a sans font, but some other headers such as ‘Graphic Design newsletter’ header use serif font. Two more fonts have priorities and are used for content: Helvetica and Verdana. They are of the same family, but they don’t look the same. It’s hardly understandable why you need to use them both at the same time on the same page.

Initially the color scheme was supposed to be fine: gray gradient as a background, bright green gradient for header background, nice dark green gradient for menu and good choice of black, gray, and green for content text, headers, and links. Looks like font size was also assumed to be ok. However after the page was initially designed here comes another someone who uses a non-native shade of green for non-header content, absolutely alien red, needless to say that it’s very poorly used as a font background. Font size for ‘Talk Design’ introduction block is enormously huge as if someone was very much afraid that visitors will not read the website content if it wasn’t being said what it was about so loudly that even a deaf man would hear. Shade of gray-blue for the right column sections doesn’t look native to the original green-gray scheme either. Blue stripe for ‘PREMIUM CONTENT’ block makes me think that it’s irrelevant as well. Read headers do not belong to the color idea of this design, at least they don’t look like they belong.

Following browsing reveal some other color artifacts such as blue color for link ‘home’ in the path line with red hover state of the link, those are basic browser colors, someone obviously forgotten to attach style to that part of content.

Just for comparison, if you navigate to Discussion Forum you may see the ‘Member log in’ and ‘Lost password’ fields, which do look like they belong to what the designer created as an image for your project.

There is another section on ‘Text Size’ page: ‘About this site’ which appeared from nowhere and looks like it’s something from a completely different project. One of a sudden the 5th font is being used for the headers in that section, besides the colors are not native here either. Plus, it’s structurally illogical to place pretty important section (it looks more like a Site Map to me) inside of a technical section (Text Size), which itself doesn’t in my opinion belong to the main menu.

‘Membership has its advantages’ block in a ‘Member Area’ has alien colors, bad frame, and it’s header is being repeated twice.

With all that being said there is no consistency in the website design, and I have just mentioned only visual part of it. I could continue with old fashion table based coding, badly structured content, poorly written HTML, non-existing SEO, big cognitive load of the project, but I am beginning to feel that I may be well paid for that kind of analysis. But I believe that what has been already said is a good enough argument.

Sorry for being a little rough on the edges, I am just sincere.

With respect,
Natasha Chernyavskaya