Uploaded few days ago

[Cloud]

Hi everyone!

Finished a site this week for student accommodation in bradford (yorkshire, UK). The brief was to keep the site clean, professional and yet still able to appeal to young students. The colour was pre-determined as that is their colour and it is actually a fresh modern colour which appeals to that age group. It also needed to appeal to overseas coming over to the UK to study so could not go for an out and out 'youth' site which tends to be alienating to people. The clients are having some professional photos taken and most of the photos will change once I have those.

http://www.malikhalls.com/index.htm

[angelize]

I think you did a great job skech. I like the colours that pink does indeed give it a fresh modern look.

[pauland]

Nice design, but the pink won't appeal to the majority of the male students, I think. It's a very odd colour choice indeed since it's strongly associated with feminine attributes - my first impression is that it's female-only accommodation..

Pink , Green and Blue - should be two colours really. Green button square edge, Blue rounded.

"Purpose built" - capital P! and really it should be hyphenated, the black background is jagged. Same for every other heading on that panel.

[Cloud]

Thanks frances and paul.

The idea behind the green and blue is that the green is the more important and the blue is second important, there are some great articles on colour choices for buttons on google. The blue is not a button so hence it is rounded off.

The pink colour as I said is their corporate colour, and they showed me some market research they had commissioned and the pink colour was chosen but the majority of male and female students, second colour choice was purple; people in their teens and early twenties these days are not that hung up on pink as being just a female colour. As for the purpose built, I will look at changing to hyphenated, but all the text in those panels are lower case, again to keep it informal to appeal to young students. the jagged edges are meant to be like that, it's a conscious design element.

Paul that is a great example of what I was talking about in an earlier post about giving critiques of websites, thank you and to you Frances.

[pauland]

I'll ask my Art student daughter!

The research does surprise me, not that pink is accessible to all "youngsters" but that it's feminine association is so weak. My 23 year old graduate Son is unlikely to go for a strong shade of pink, liberal that he is. It's also interesting that the focus seems to be on the young students, when often choices are made in consultation with parents who no doubt will have associations with the colour. Anyway, your client likes it. Given the location there may be cultural influences at work too.

Your business is booming, Sketch!

[gwpriester]

It is more of a magenta than pink pink, but I would tend to agree with Paul.

Clean site and happily no tinting.

[pauland]

If I angle my laptop screen to tilt more upwards, the colour changes and becomes a deeper red without the vibrancy - much more pleasing to the eye and not gender related.

It's OK Sketch, I'm not campaigning to get you to change the colour - Gary's comment made me look again. I think PCs and Macs tend to have slightly different colour rendition anyway.

[mwenz]

I think the colors work well.

The larger images at the top of each page could be better optimized. For instance, the one on the Area page is 433k. I optimized it down to 124k with zero additional artifacts. Why would this be moderately important? Not everyone has fast Internet nor phones. Speaking of which, it also penalizes those with limited data plans for their phones, tablets, etc.

In any case, another nicely design site.

Mike

[TXAlba]

Nice clean site, very little negative comments to make
1. navicon is not ideal, their site logo would be clearer and more recognisable
2. contact email address on contact page should be a link (take it they couldnt afford a contact form)
3. dont like the world map in footer, nothing wrong with the map itself but dont see the relevance to the site, or its purpose.

Positive comments:
1. nice and clean, no nonsense site
2. clean crisp galleries sitting on the page well
3. fonts work well
4. shadows under menu bar and again under main page image are a very nice touch, like how they manage to make the image 'sit on' rather than be in the page. The whole sites 'POPS' as a direct consequence of these menu and image shadows.....inspirational!!
5. i like your 'links page' (area) - the method used to get links to other pages here is clever and useful
6. Blue overhangs on main images are just the right colour and fit the site and images themselves very well

Suggestions
1. the Halls main image loads a little slower than there respective images on other pages, further optimisation will help
2. Facebook/twitter.......as the site is targeting young people i would make links to these sites prominent on home and contact page.
3. for me - menus, and most likely personal preference, i tend to want to click the wording under the actual link rather than the navbar itself but you do get used to this very quickly, just not my taste.
4. UK map, i like this and know the constraints the shape causes but in this case 'Click to Enlarge' is not doing its job, yes it makes it larger but not clearer so the site user, they having to make it larger still using icon bottom left of already enlarged image. I think many will click once, not see a clear image and click away rather than enlarge again.

Question, what do you use to make your main page slide show? is it xara widget generated?

Overall: i like the site and the colours, it might sound like im being critical but most are personal preference, the overall site has a good feel about it and is smooth with no obvious failings. A pat on the back there Skech

[Cloud]

thank you, I myself have suggested that responses to site threads be more critical (good and bad) so this is welcome. I will follow your suggestions with the aim of getting the site just right. I have not made the social links more prominent as they have yet to set up the facebook, twitter or google pages up yet, once they have I will look at making them much more prominent. As for the world map, it is really there as a filler if I am being honest but the vast majority of students to Bradford University are foreign students, mainly Chinese, Malaysian, Indonesian and African so I thought a map of the world would be nice. I guess it is a non offensive item which I will look at changing when I find something better to do with that space.