The North East SPCA

[bwood]

After 3 years of fundraising our Shelter is finally open. Had a huge gala a week ago. Been updating this one from scratch. I'm going to add a few moving parts and a better background but they like a nice clean website. The variant is still challenging. I'd like to work in a slide show header but I'm still working on it.

Www.northeastspca.org

[gwpriester]

Bill - All posts in the Web Gallery are moderated automatically. Just saw this and of course approved. Glad your site is live and all the animals thank you as well.

[pauland]

After 3 years of fundraising our Shelter is finally open. Had a huge gala a week ago. Been updating this one from scratch. I'm going to add a few moving parts and a better background but they like a nice clean website. The variant is still challenging. I'd like to work in a slide show header but I'm still working on it.

Www.northeastspca.org

Please look again at your site - the page length is far too long and the footers are half-way up the page with blank space below. I'd also like to make a suggestion about content - it would nice to see some stories about specific animals. This will draw in people and personalise the work that you do far more than general pictures of events and facilities. Make it about the animals. Thank you for your hard work.

[bwood]

Thanks @pauland ... . We’re working on stories at the moment. Might you have a recommendation on the “ adoptables” page. I’ve ended up with far too many thumbnails, but I’ve looked at various slide shows and some become quite large and slow to load. Other than a thumbnail pop up to 500 px I haven’t found anything that works as well.

[Boy]

I like the page as it is right now. Or do you have many more pictures to show?

Nice site and great work!

[jackb]

Good job - the site presents quite well. Obviously a bit of a problem with bottom of page leaving white space below. Not sure what the answer is for that. The mobile variant is getting there - looks like it may need the 'scale to page width' option enabled - someone more skilled than me might comment. otherwise, it looks pretty clean- maybe a good graphic designer could run their eye over it and fix a few layout things. (I;m very lucky- my partner is a good graphic designer and fixes up my website bloopers)
Cheers, John

[jackb]

yep - just had another look after posting.... a graphic designer could tweak the font sizes - IMO the banner image headlines need to be bigger and then other headings and text will need adjusting- not a big deal though. John

[jackb]

After 3 years of fundraising our Shelter is finally open. Had a huge gala a week ago. Been updating this one from scratch. I'm going to add a few moving parts and a better background but they like a nice clean website. The variant is still challenging. I'd like to work in a slide show header but I'm still working on it.

Www.northeastspca.org

Hi Bill, I'd like to give you a graphic design perspective if that's okay.

There are some areas that could be polished a bit. For example, there should really be only 2-3 different fonts used on any one site. These need to have a hierarchy, for example all headlines might be in capitals and a bit heavier and the sub texts would be smaller and a bit lighter. Then you might have a special font heading style for items in boxes.

I love some of your banner images but I would change them around a bit. It might also be worth looking at some high quality magazines to see how they position things on a page to look balanced and also to take the reader in the right direction.

It's also important to have 1 thing on every page that your eye is drawn to. If everything is about the same size visually, people don't know where to look and quickly pass to the next page. Obviously the thing you want people to pay the most attention to is what you would make larger.

I think you are missing a bit of visual value by putting some of your text on the images. They might have more impact if they are below the image or on a bar of colour at the bottom of the image. Again look at how magazines do it. If you really want to put your text in the banner images there is a bit of an art to it. It always looks better if the text is in the same place on every image. Again creating consistency. You really need a graphic designer to modify images so the text stands out.

There is a thing you need to do with the dotted line at the bottom of each page so it only scrolls down to the bottom of your footer info. If you grab the blue dotted line way down the page and drag it to the bottom of your footer it will stop you having all that white space after your footer.

The banner image on the about us page is cropping at the top when it is at full screen so it needs to be made a bit wider to accommodate the distance.

The events page is not clear as to what you are saying. I think it's important to always link your images with the relevant text and never have an image without some explanation of what it's doing there. Is the oval text referring to the image below it? The oval shape itself is a bit random as there is nothing else like that on the site. Just because you can have these shapes doesn't always mean you should use them

I would recommend putting a banner image on the Fee-Application page to keep the site visually consistent.

One last set of comments... With the text 'We’re waiting for You this New Year!' the shadow on the text is very far away from the actual text and needs to be moved much closer. It's also in a different font again from the headline and sub head texts but it seems to be the only place you have used it. This line of text has some words in lower case and some in capital and lower case format. Again this is something that should be a conscious decision to go one way or the other and to be consistent throughout the site.

Hope I haven't overloaded you and that you find this information helpful. Helping was my intent!

Cheers,

Lisa.

[bwood]

@jackb. Lisa, thanks so much for the critique. I’ve solved the white space problem, simple fix. Also in the midst of standardizing the font hierarchy. Some pages are image heavy and slow to load so checking optimization of all photos.

Presently working on a better navigation for the smart phone variant, that I dislike at the moment. Thanks for all your points. Working on them one by one.

-Bill

[1alexie]

I hope that you will be able to find these animals a new home and owner.