Re: is my site a parody ????? LOL
First - thanks for posting your link and asking for feedback. I think that discussions like this can potentially benefit many of us as we get input from many folks with varied design experience and perspectives. Also - as noted, you don't necessarily have to take all comments as being authoritative. As Bruce Lee once said, "Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless, and add what is uniquely your own." (the underlying philosophy behind Jeet Kune Do, for those who may be interested)
Hopefully you will know your potential customers and target market better than strangers will, and a careful consideration of this will influence your final decisions.
With all that said, and remembering that my experience and judgment is based on companies and clients that I've worked with -- and also keeping in mind that although I've been in IT, operations, management and consulting for about a thousand years, I'm not a professional designer -- just an amateur with lots of opinions. You've got a good message to deliver, and I believe you can do so more effectively. /Preamble Off...
I guess I didn't see the first iteration of the site, so my comments are based on what it looks like as of 9/23 at about 10am Eastern Time.
I find the overall colors (ranges of blue) appealing, but I find the background (checkerboard pattern over something like a blue sky tiled image) distracting. This might be a byproduct of screen resolution -- my browser window is covering most of one of my two monitors right now, meaning that it's open to almost 1280 x 1024. At that size, I'm seeing about 1.5" of the tiled background on either side of the page itself. The page on top of that background is about 9" wide (on my monitor), so this vivid, high contrast, tiled background is taking up fully 1/3 of the visual real estate on the screen. I think this might work better if you muted the effect of the background -- perhaps reducing the contrast range and either making it significantly lighter, or darker, than the actual content portion of the page. I would think this might help direct the eye to the content more effectively, and reduce distraction.
There appear to be MANY different shades of blue on the page, making it feel less like a cohesive design theme than it might otherwise. I'd suggest assembling a palette of theme colors, and trying to work within them for the primary elements of the site.
The flash horizontal nav bar doesn't feel like it belongs with the rest of the page. The blue color doesn't quite match any other blue I see on the page, giving it something of a feel of having been "dropped into" the website. I used to like flash nav bars, but tend to avoid them these days as distractions unless they're done REALLY tastefully, or the mouse-over effects are essential to the design concept. But -- if you keep it, I think it will work much better if the blue of the nav bar matches the dominant dark blue you use on the rest of the page.
Maybe this was touched on earlier in the thread, if so, my apologies: what are there two nav bars, e.g., the horizontal flash bar, and the vertical non-functional one on the left of the page? Confusing! I'd pick one or the other, and stick with this.
Visual elements: there appear to be many small sections on the page right now, e.g.,
- top section ("hello and welcome...") -- the placement and proportions make this appear at first glance to be a banner ad, and I'm used to skipping reading banner ads whenever possible, so your important intro message is lost to me and the first thing I start to read is below your "website from 50 per page" line. I would suggest grouping the important introductory text content together and placing it so that the eye is drawn there FIRST. Once people absorb the basic message, they can move on to detail that may be distributed elsewhere on the page / site, but until they know what you're about, don't make it a challenge for people to figure out. As a quick way to address this, I might try moving that top block of text down to the section below the "websites from..." message, and making it the new first paragraph.
Following along: if you want to keep that "top banner" with the two martial arts guys, perhaps you could shrink down the URL logo that's below it, and move it up and in between the two guys to replace that text that I suggest moving down below. This would accomplish a few things:
- guide the reader to the important intro text messages in one place, making for an easier user UI navigation experience
- shrink the URL text logo a bit: right now at its large size, I'm seeing all sorts of aliasing issues with the curvy text. This could be made less apparent at a smaller size, and you could minimize it still more using some of the semi-transparency and color palette tricks for anti-aliasing with PNG or GIF images over the background of the top banner. These could just about eliminate any visible "jaggies" you see along the edges of the letters in the URL logo.
- finally - if you do something on the order of the above few items, all that white space about the flash nav bar will now be open. White space can be good -- but I'd shrink this up about about 50% to 60% so the important text message can appear higher -- and more visibly -- on the page.
I'm personally not comfortable with the text justification. Everything down the middle of the page is center justified, and I find it distracting that some lines are full width while others have only two or three words. I find this makes for choppy reading -- feels something like an e.e. cummings poem in this respect. I'd suggest either left justified or left/right justified paragraph text, perhaps with an indented first line if you like, and some white space between paragraphs.
All the little "areas" on the page seem to blend with the banner ads -- at first glance, it almost appears that your own sections of information are more banner ads as a result. Items such as the yellow Flash animation ("free domain name"...etc), the purple "special offer", the box below the purple special offer ("to see one of our...") seem to be subject to this effect -- at first glance, they're sufficiently different from each other and the rest of the page so that my first impression is that they, too, are banner ads -- and so I don't look at them. As a result of this, my first reaction -- perhaps subconscious -- is that it appears that the page is covered with banner ads, and after staring at the Internet for so many years, I find ad-laden pages to be less appealing than those with a reasonable use of ad space.
Your Proofreading example: While the text may be improved, you lose some of the benefit you're trying to demonstrate by switching fonts and not formatting the paragraphs in the "after proofreading" section very effectively. I'd suggest keeping the same font as the "before proofreading" section, and adding a space between paragraphs for readability. Considering making both "before" and "after" justified the same (e.g., both "left justified").
The green "website design & Maintained by..." bar jumps out as being inconsistent with the rest of the page. I'm realizing as I type this that you have a disclaimer above saying that only the top half of the page has been worked on, so if this comment is premature, accept my apologies.
I'm not clear how the Claudia Winifred article at the bottom helps you. Perhaps, instead, you can select specific design principles that YOU abide by, and have a small section that notes these as some of your guiding principles.
Finally: too many ads!
Remember: this is all just one person's opinion, not necessarily good or bad, but hopefully food for thought that you can discard or potentially use as you consider design alternatives. Also: it's far easier to critique other peoples' work than our own! Thanks again for braving this forum and opening yourself to group critique -- it's a brave thing to do, and we all benefit!
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