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[cursor]

Here is the one I am working on: http://maui-island-vacations.com/index3.htm

PLEASE feel free to critique and advise. Obviously, I am not finished with it. I plan to have several other pages based on the same template.

Please note that all of your button mouseOvers need text attention.

[katecj]

Hi Kate,

I think you're off to a great start. I'll make a few suggestions to get things moving.

1) Alignment. Our eyes like things to have edges and follow some kind of structure. Aligning page elements allows the eyes to see edges and make sense of an arrangement. Take some time over alignment (use guides) and make sure things line up (the buttons for example). It only takes a few pixels out of alignment to make things look wrong. I've used some guides to give you an idea.

2) It's a wide page - probably wider than it needs to be.

3) A nose sticking out from a panel isn't a good look. With such large bold panels the picture is lost.

4) On other pages the white space seems to be dominant and the thumbnail content seems a bit lost amongst the white.

5) I don't like having too many different fonts on a page - see if you could live with two, or at least if there's a paragraph in one box and a paragraph in another, make them of the same font.

Hope that helps.

Paul

Thanks for the tips. I agree it's too wide, but I didn't know how to fit the search area in there without making it wide. I added the photo at the last minute because I thought it needed a punch. But then that photo takes forever on my husband's computer sooo, I'm going to get rid of it.

[pauland]

Thanks for the tips. I agree it's too wide, but I didn't know how to fit the search area in there without making it wide. I added the photo at the last minute because I thought it needed a punch. But then that photo takes forever on my husband's computer sooo, I'm going to get rid of it.

I'm not sure why the search area needs a 950 pixel wide table - I'm sure it could be made narrower.

The image is 354K - a png file. If you made it a jpg file it would shrink dramatically..

Paul

[JKatz]

Hey jcatz - glad that helped. I'd guess the next thing in line would be the .swf file you've got. What did you make this with? Do you have an option in that utility to compress the images?

Your swf file is quite large. Looks like site-perf and other such tools kinda just barf on it, but appears to be over 4mb from what I can tell. Looks like it is in the load order such that the rest of the page is waiting on it to get going.

I bet without that flash or with it optimized, your page would load fine. Most of your other graphics are under 5k each (save the header @ 50k).

Thanks, I'm still working on it. Yes, the .swf file is very large (OK, huge) so I'm going to have to do some investigating to get it smaller. I created it with XWD. The point of our website is to be inclusive of members' pets so it's a rather important inclusion (and still growing).

[slavelle]

I've actually just about completed a dog care website. Take a look at the Gallery page on my test location. This was done with java, not flash, and was a real pain to get lined up across the browsers, but is pretty efficient in the way it loads the larger (50k each) pictures (though on a slow connection, you will see the pics load without the css alignment sometimes). It also lets the client update the code to add more pics pretty easily - in your case that doesn't matter because you are the designer and the client. I don't know if you would be able to use a placeholder in some way to accomplish this...the original code for the slideshow was gotten from here: http://www.leigeber.com/2008/12/javascript-slideshow/ though I've removed the titles and obviously rethemed/resized it a bit.

Anyway - this site was not done with xwd, rather html/css hand coded (using MS Expression Web as the editor - which I really like since it creates fairly clean code and works with external style sheets, including GUI css tag changes - though all the graphics were done in xara xtreme. I didn't do the design - a graphic designer friend of the owner did. I just did the coding.

I didn't get XWD until after I was almost done with all the manual template creation, and the client doesn't want a "xara created page" - they want to be able to make updates themselves to a degree (which is really a bad idea for so many reasons, but...) - with that being said, I'd be able to do nearly the same site in WAY less time than it took to code, especially since xxtreme was used to mock the thing up to start with!

http://dogma.technicalrs.com

Love to hear your thoughts (except about design stuff, over which I have input but no "say").

[JKatz]

Nice site, slavelle. Well done. I couldn't get the webcam button to do anything though.

My cover is still a work in progress but I've put it up as is for now. I'm recreating the flash & reducing the dpi on the photos (probably will end up being this weekend's project as I keep getting interrupted).

I'll look into that option, thank you! The member photos idea was a great one but I quickly got innundated with many more than I expected so a better plan is definitely in order.

[slavelle]

Webcam button is to be scrapped - it will be added later - budget reasons dictated that the cameras would have to wait, as will the integration to the site. Clearly, this one is not quite fully baked.

[RodneyLee]

heres my first attempt with Web Designer

http://www.crestoneendoflifeproject.org

love teh program, if I could get all my Dreamweaver .ste to import to text or load into WD, I dump Dreamweaver

[ankhor]

Okay I was playing with webdesigner, and even as it is
easy you still make mistakes and don`t know stuff, which you
find out as you go.

Anyhow, I made a mock site, and when people see it
they know what it is all about

http://www.xs4all.nl/~anchhor/webtest/index.htm

[remi]

Now, that's really great, Ankhor!

Remi