Wow...

Just wow...

Where shall i begin? The Comic Sans? The scattered navigation? Mixed fonts? Drag-and-drop styled layout? The company's name/ logo?

As I browsed this page, a few of the sub pages looked similar, however the buttons switched places and position as did the logo and content.

This, is an okay website, if it were created using Geocities drag-and-drop page designer back in 1999. But for a small company/ organization, you should probably learn the basics of Dreamweaver and make the site a bit more... professional.

2 Bad Things...

I haven't updated in a while... so these 2 things hopefully will make up for that!

First is a tear flyer for a "busy local graphic design and printing company". This is full of well thought out Times New Roman type, extra exclamation points, and perfect spelling!

(found on a google search)

Next up is a wonderful portfolio webpage design. This one has 3 images for that roll over for the different aspects of Design this person/company does. You click on the images and it brings you to a page with the small "over state" image from the main page that has different parts of it clickable so you can view a small sample of their work.

Easy as ABC...

I found this while looking for graphic designers. You open up the page and find a sticky animated gif for the opening graphic that blinks and flashes and goes to the logo. The logo it's self is nice and simple, following the trend of current logos. Scroll down (yes a lot of scrolling on the index page), and you get to the menu. Very simple going along with their ABC, separated by 100% width unstyled tags. Another thing that kind of doesn't seem to work well is the amount of colors used. It seems like every other line is a different color and in a large bold text. If you want to learn about what this company does, you have to click on a small white link titled "info" under one of the horizontal lies.

You click the links to view samples of the artist's work. The main problem with these pages is their consistency. Each page has a different header graphic with the company name on it. None of the pages use the logo that we see on the main page, instead some styleized text that looks like word art from MSWord.

The last thing that irks me about the page is the address. They stay with the members.cox.com address. A lot of times when people are searching for portfolis on line and they see something like this they will just skip over it. It dosn't give a very professional look. Even if you cannot afford a monthly fee for your own web hosting and you use a free service, or are hosted by a friend, look into investing $10 a year on a domain name that you can cloak your old URL with. Domain names can be registerd with many companies, I use www.godaddy.com and pay $10 per year for it.

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My suggestions for designing your web page/ portfolio page is to study other people's pages. Look at your favorite artist or designer's pages and see what they do. If you like something figure out how you can borrow it or incorporate a similar element in with your design and make it your own Don't copy it directly, just borrow an idea and make it yours. A simple Google search will let you find numerous elements for fee that can help make your web page pop and look more professional. http://www.dynamicdrive.com has may elements that you may like to incorporate. Do not go and add a million onto your pages because you like them or want to use it. Think about it first. Does it have a purpose? Is it something that will help users navigate/ view your page? Is it needed?

Also, keep scroling to a minimum. Yes you will have to scroll on a page that lists your resume, or short biography, maybe even your portfolio. Try and keep your index/ splash page very short. Your logo, contact information and navigation links are all you really need on this page.

Keep your sub pages similar looking. Develope a nice header with navigation links and logo that will stay the same and in the same place on each page. If you want you can have a banner that works with it and change the images depending on the page you are on, but keep the logo and navigation in the same location to keep with uniformity.

Layout Issues

At work I am currently trying to design a web page layout for a new product we are going to be releasing. So what I did was I got on the web and started looking at the web design of the competition. I like to do this, so I can get a feel of how to form our pages, what to do, what not to do, what to add, what not to add.

So I was browsing and came across this gem. It's a nice simple page for a smaller company that is less mainstream. The layout is okay... for a live journal layout. I would never think of using a layout like this in the commercial market world. It looks very page builder. Kinda like "Oh hai, I just got Geocities page builder and I'm workin' a new web site!"

Some of the things that irk me, besides most of the whole thing include, but are not limited to:

1.) The header/ banner. If you want people to be wowed by your company, you should always save the logo/ header/ banner as a highly compressed jpeg image. And to top it all off, make sure the div you put the image in cuts off half of your logo.

2.) The navigation. This doesn't bother me all too much. The CSS rollovers and drop downs are kind of the in thing at the moment. (remember the static frame to the left for navigation?) I think that this one could have used a little more styling. Maybe have normal text bold on mouse over and change color? And for the drop downs have normal text become underlined?

3.) Body content/ Colors and images. Again, this looks pretty live journal to me. The nice vector logo on the left looks nice, with decent spacing and the text next to it looks fine. Then we travel down more. Now I see why the used different colors for the paragraphs, but could I think it would be a bit better if they alternated header colors and kept the text a nice black or a dark gray.