Construction Website

[Iamhim]

A construction site created with Xara. Sliders and photo gallery are made from apycom software.

http://millercustombuilder.com

[Iamhim]

What a nice website!! You are him!!!

[Iamhim]

[steve.ledger]

What's all this silliness?
Are you seriously looking for some feedback/critique on your site or just here to fool around?

[Iamhim]

The world does need a little silliness every now and again.

Please critique away, as it is what I am looking for.

One thing I am looking to fix is to optimize images. Example would be the big wood blocks on the top and bottom. They are in png format and when I optimize them the shading goes all to hell and just looks....bad.

I would love these two png's to be rendered right away, at least with the two wooden side bars that connect the top and bottom but this is not the case especially if you never visited the site before.



When I put the url in the search bar and hit images, it actually shows me the wood backgrounds!! Cant find other sites that do this so any way of optimizing these two png's.

[angelize]

Hi Iamhim you can optimize your images quite easily Utilities> optimize Photo

[Iamhim]

I did try that and that's when the shading started to get ugly.
Question: the image has to be in png to get the shading, right? I tried jpg format and it was even worse.
Right now I think the backgrounds ( the wood bg's) are being treated like a high quality photo. Ill try and let Xara optimize them again and see what happens.
Thanks for your input.

[steve.ledger]

The timber panels have a drop shadow that uses alpha transparency. As JPG does not support transparencies, they remain as PNG which are generally much larger than JPG.
You may have to rethink your design, there's a lot going on there with no real sense of focus.

[Iamhim]

Ok. The site is sold already so there is not too much of rethinking my design, I just want it to render better. When you say no real sense of focus, do you mean It just looks like I threw a bunch of things together? Maybe to much?
Should I have not made the timber panels png? Please elaborate on the "no real sense of focus". I am all ears since I have been reading and taking advice from you and angelize for some time now, probably going on two years and you guys have helped a lot. Really. Thankyou. All the moderators here are very knowledgeable, especially with Xara.
Is there too much?

[steve.ledger]

Is there too much?

I mean this in the nicest possible way..
Your site is really cluttered and appears as though you've grabbed a bag full of ideas that you really like and thrown them all into the one site without any thought to how they will work together as a whole or where they fit best. There are black glow shadows and red glow shadows and white glow shadows, there is animation at the top and animation below on the home page both trying to grab the visitors attention (there's even snow on one page!), there are too many different font faces and way too many different font sizes, flat text and 3D text. There's G+ and Twitter graphics at the top and twitter again at the bottom, even a twitter feed on one page. There's a variety of facebook buttons or tiles all of different designs and/or sizes scattered all over the place. The red text on a blue envelope for the contact page hurts (it is a well known colour-mix no-no) There are flat objects, raised objects, 3D objects, at least two styles of popup galleries, solid colour backgrounds and textured backgrounds, rounded-rectangles and non-rounded rectangles - really there is no homogeny at all to this website. And google custom search on every page? What would I be searching for, there's barely any text that has any information about the site, it's all wiggly things, widgets and boxes of pictures..
The only thing I didn't find there is the kitchen sink!

But hey you very likely had a great deal of fun building it and honestly, if you've sold the site and the client is satisfied then take everything I have said with a pinch of salt..
But you did ask.