My New Site - Responsive Design Elements

Trevor

New Member
We just rebuilt our site, the little feedback we have received was about the page load time, however analytics tell a different story show avg time on site to be more than 8 mins, which tells me that people are not leaving before it loads.

According to numerous page load timers i am seeing 3-6 second times.


What do you all think?
http://www.uniqueadvertisingsolutions.com
 

Phreaddee

Super Moderator
Staff member
Dont get why its all one page, kinda defeats having a menu really
Its too dark and the blue is all wrong.
Doesnt fit particularly well on my android either, well the slideshow at least...
To call this "responsive web design" is a bit of a stretch.
And that background i'd remove. Just dont like wood panel, unless you are a builder or flooring specialist, then it might be appropriate.
 

Trevor

New Member
Dont get why its all one page, kinda defeats having a menu really
Its too dark and the blue is all wrong.
Doesnt fit particularly well on my android either, well the slideshow at least...
To call this "responsive web design" is a bit of a stretch.
And that background i'd remove. Just dont like wood panel, unless you are a builder or flooring specialist, then it might be appropriate.

It should work perfectly on droid. Blackberry was the only one i was mildly concerned with.

the nav is functional, it scrolls you to each section.

a couple of my coders dont care for the dark and blue, but i like it. They have tried to get me to go with 0062fc rather than 0000fc, but the logo is 0000fc.

i dont know how it can be "more" responsive, it is coded to adapt to any screen size. The slider is a bit large but it shows fine on devices that we have tested it on.


Thanks for the input

P.S Your landing page is pretty cool, not seen that yet, very original
 
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Phreaddee

Super Moderator
Staff member
Cheers, thats just a canvas script.

The nav works, I did check that, but it became redundant as you just need to scroll.
The blue is fine on its own, but it slightly clashes with the background.
If your gungho on keeping it than maybe alter the background to match better.
I guess what I was referring to regarding the slideshow is even at the full width showing on my screen, the right > is all cramped up ontop of the slideshow, and wasnt much room to breathe.
Responsive web design is not just making it "fit" on all devices. But rather modifying the way it renders so that it is perceived to look as appropriate as possible for that device. For example you have 3 col of text. As the viewport is shrunk, this should become two and then one. As 3 col on phone in portrait is not really readable...
 
Somehow I don’t think you really understand the core concept of responsive web design.
I don’t see any media queries and no browser specific style sheets. The idea of responsive web design is not to make the page look just the same on a hand held device, hell my current site does that and it is not at ALL what I would call responsive. I would recommend doing some research on what exactly responsive web design is before you advertise yourself as it. On my droid if I click your “who and what” link in portrait mode, I see what would be three pages on your site, with no navigation back up. And yes while your site is a single page, lack of navigation can be really confusing for your average person, especially when viewed in landscape. When I take your website in a web browser and change the viewport, I should see, something……. Also loose that background for handhelds as its load time is bad and frankly not needed. If your page load time is any concern for you, you could always drop those java files into the footer, which I couldn’t find.
 

Trevor

New Member
If you have ever tried to find a definition of responsive design you know that you can not find a definitive answer, you will find many articles and many opinions. This is because it is not a recipe, it is as much the thought process the precedes the website development as it is the actual building of the site. Adaptive design is the same but it does have a bit more defined "recipe". When Marcotte wrote his article on responsive design it was, as far as i know, the first documentation on the subject. I have not read the book but i did purchase copies for my programmers and they all seem to have a solid grasp. My website was designed by me and coded by them, i did not follow every recommendation that they provided as i felt some of the things to make it more "responsive" would hinder the visuals and i did not want that. So my "opinion" of responsive design may not be correct, but whose is?

My site does not act like the skeleton framework that Gamanche has built (which is very good) I would consider that to be the ideal responsive design, mine is not the ideal hence the title "design elements"

Regarding page load times, by tweaking on the ajax settings we were able to get the average load time down to 5.6 secs without losing any resolution on anything, and that is 3 seconds faster than before. 5.6 is not ideal but I don't think its bad either.

Thanks for your input.
 

Trevor

New Member
Cheers, thats just a canvas script.

The nav works, I did check that, but it became redundant as you just need to scroll.
The blue is fine on its own, but it slightly clashes with the background.
If your gungho on keeping it than maybe alter the background to match better.
I guess what I was referring to regarding the slideshow is even at the full width showing on my screen, the right > is all cramped up ontop of the slideshow, and wasnt much room to breathe.
Responsive web design is not just making it "fit" on all devices. But rather modifying the way it renders so that it is perceived to look as appropriate as possible for that device. For example you have 3 col of text. As the viewport is shrunk, this should become two and then one. As 3 col on phone in portrait is not really readable...

I am not 100% happy with the BG but i havent had an idea that i like better as of yet. I really like the wood, but making it lighter looks bad and going darker actually looks better for all the other elements but washes out the texture.

The programmers want to set the site to actually drop the 3rd column on a mobile device, it would not be a terrible loss, im just being resistant. I would prefer to keep the 3 columns but making it switch to a 2 column and keeping the data in the 3rd and wrapping it looks really bad so the only option is to simply remove that 3rd column. Going with a single column looks better than wrapping but makes a page that is a mile or so long.
 
Sorry but your plain out wrong. A simple Google search of the term should show you, and anyone else that. There's nothing fluid about your design. No scaleable images, no media queries, nothing that actually changes with a change in the view port. I looked at Dave Gamache(if you’re going to use someone as a reference you should at least spell his name right) as I have never heard of him before (I'm a follower of Chis Coyier and Paul Irish) and what he has is responsive, go back and resize his page, see how it resizes??? Yours does none of that. I can see lots of elements on your page that could benefit from that (that little “this is a slider thing", that doesn’t work too well on a hand held).

QA of web design is what I do as part of my full time job, this just doesn’t pass as what your trying to sell it as. Again I offer you (since you mentioned him) to do a search of Ethan Marcotte favorite responsive web designs, what you have created does NOT fall into that grouping. If you’re more worried about how doing a proper responsive design would hinder some of the graphic elements I again say you don’t get it. It’s about making sites easier for hand held and mobile devices and yes, due to constraints of these devices sometimes some of that has to go away.

You say you bought the book and never read it but gave it to your "programmers"???? Well read the book and get some new programmers, they got it wrong. Please don't come on here and tell people who may be new to the concept of responsive web that what you do is correct, it’s not, and pointing people in the wrong direction with concepts and a site that just plainly, no matter how you may want to define it (because no matter what you might think, there is most certainly a definition of it and while there may be different ideas on HOW, there is no argument over WHAT) does not fall into the category of responsive.
 
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ancom

New Member
I think a business website should never use such dark colors. You need a warm and comfortable place to attract your clients.
 

ronaldroe

Super Moderator
Staff member
I think a business website should never use such dark colors. You need a warm and comfortable place to attract your clients.

A business website should use colors that effectively convey the product and target demo, not fit some predetermined ideal of what a business site should look like.
 

sophina

New Member
Your landing page is really cool, I love the slide show, but the loading of the page takes way too much time.. Other than that - fantastic job!
 

Bambi

New Member
I think there are some alignment issues with your site. When I scroll down, the positioning of things seem to be off (like the contact us forms, etc). There is a lot of info on the homepage in which I think you could cut down some. Keep in mind that I'm viewing your site from a Safari browser.
 
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