Constructive critisim please

[troubled_woman]

Ok, here goes... my first site, created to promote the artwork of a friend.

I have viewed it from different machines and there is a problem with the text overlapping the left border on some screens (RESOLUTION ON BOTH MACHINES IS 600X800) monitor size does not seem to make a difference.

Have had some feedback via guest book (mainly friends of friends) and know that I need to sort out the text. My main concern is loading times of graphics - have supplied thumbnails and resampled all images but still think the loading times are unacceptable (is this my machine or will this be so because of the graphics? - what is your experience?)

Please feel free to rip the site apart as long as you give me ideas on what to research/do to correct it.

Your comments will be helpful and I am grateful for anyone taking the time to review this humble site.

P.S - What is the general feelings towards using themes/picture galleries from Frontpage? I have tried restyling the site using both but am really not sure where to go as my friend has left the design to me.

http://www.freewebs.com/indigoart (temp URL - I am in the process of researching how to purchase dimain name)

 

[ian]

I think the background images look nice. but I dont like the white space towards the left hand side of the page, the page does not look symmetrical and the navigation looks a bit odd.
Also with the tables, those borders are frontpage default, I would try using just a one line border.
Also the homepage would look better if it had a few samples of pictures on it, load time appeared to be good.

 

[stuluk28]

hey, for a first website it's not bad at all. There's just a few things that do make it look like a 'first site'!

Mainly the text overlapping and looking a little uncontrolled. I've never used microsoft frontpage so i'm not exactly sure how the program works, I'm guessing its similar to dreamweaver though?

The background pattern is nice, but could you turn it around 180º and move it flush with the left border? (also stop it from repeating because at the moment it appears floating in the middle of my screen when I open my browser window fully). Then move all the text in slightly from the left.

The main text could be reduced in size it looks about 16pts at the moment and only really needs to be around 11pts at the biggest!

Also the table borders appear on some pages and not others. It'd be could to hide them all. So the type and images just sit on the page nicely.

Maybe try bringing the right border in for all the content. Because alot of the lines of text are quite short, spread out like that they look even smaller. If you reduce the width of the table the lines will condense and it'll look like theres more stuff on the page! I see at the moment it's set to expand as the browser window expands, but it's not doing your layout any justice, you should tell it where you want the images to be and fix the table width!

These are just my opinions, I hope some of them are interesting and useful and you keep up the design work!

 

[troubled_woman]

Thanks for that, I have had similar feedback from friends and family too - too much white space, text shifts on some monitors, inconsitent use of borders. I am nearly finished mark 2 and will upload this weekend. I will be back for your comments if its ok

Cheers

 

[yelleyster]

I don't know if this was said, but a lot of sites now-a-days are trying to get away from using the java effects on pictures and what not. I know it looks great and what not, but once you start throwing java up on the page it can be a big waste of your time in the long run because it means people NEED to have it in order to view the page properly.

Another thing is if you look at your actual java code, you'll notice that at the bottom of the page when one of its scripts are loading, it will say a message which is embedded into the script that you pasted. So just look that over and flush all of that out.