Can I get some critique on my site?

So, I work for a company who manufactures and distributes baby nursery furniture and car child restraints. The design brief was "something professional, that won't alienate our customers".

So I did this - http://www.infa-secure.com.au/

There are quite a few things I don't personally like, but the boss wouldn't budge on. I think I've managed to deliver what was asked of me. It's a modern looking, professional site, and the core demographic is mothers / mothers-to-be.

Anyway, I'd appreciate some feedback on the look and functionality of the site, if you have a spare minute or two.

Thanks, faggots.

-The gradient in the menu is kinda tacky, as is the reflection of the logo. The colors are too flat for that reflection to be there.
-There are too many colors. I think things like the find a retailer search boxes should be the same color, and your whole site changes color scheme when you go to car products.
-It seems awfully flashy for how little content there appears to be.

Overall though its not bad, i've seen much worse.

Get some better fonts. These scream "domain squatter".

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Originally Posted by arjue

-The gradient in the menu is kinda tacky, as is the reflection of the logo. The colors are too flat for that reflection to be there.
-There are too many colors. I think things like the find a retailer search boxes should be the same color, and your whole site changes color scheme when you go to car products.
-It seems awfully flashy for how little content there appears to be.

Overall though its not bad, i've seen much worse.

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See, you've commented on just about all the things I don't like but can't change because the boss likes them. The reflection, the colour of the menu on the product pages.

The colour change reflects the two sides of the business, as they have 2 different coloured logos. That in itself, I don't like (I feel a logo should be consistent across a business), but the boss wouldn't budge.

As for content, I'm not sure what you mean.

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Get some better fonts. These scream "domain squatter".

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You're referring to the main menu buttons?

Yes.

needs more Aborigines

and a didgeridoo

Doc is Not Wrong.

From a technical standpoint, I highly recommend against using a Flash navigation. Especially since there does not seem to be any aesthetic & functional benefit from it aside from the fade effect (which can be achieved using javascript). It will make the site unnavigable to anyone without Flash (aside from the footer), computers as well as mobile devices, as well (even though it doesn't seem like you are overly concerned with it) take away from your page ranking within Google because of the lack of spiderable content in the main navigation. If you do use Flash for the navigation, make sure the fonts are embedded and are consistent with the rest of the site fonts. Maybe modifying the text so it stands out a little more (size and boldness, not necessarily more color).

Also, from a usability standpoint I recommend against using an internal scrolling box for your "Updates" section on the homepage. Maybe highlight 1 or 2 of the most recent "Updates" in that area not forcing scrolling, and a "click to view more" link that will navigate the user to a dedicated news page. This will both eliminate the internal scroll bar, give your news a dedicated page, as well as improve SEO.

I'm personally not a fan of the design itself, I feel like the homepage and the subpage's lack cohesion. It could be the color schemes & layouts that are throwing me off, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

Overall the markup looks decent. Make sure you're putting title tags on your anchors (and not on your images), and alt tags on your images. I could mention a number of things that would help (at least a little) with SEO, and accessibility (for screen readers) if you want me to, but the images and anchors were the first thing I noticed.

Why is there a tilde over the e in secure, in green?

Honesty:

Most important... NO FLASH. Get that shit out of there.

Tell your boss he needs to understand his target demographic better. Mothers-to-be and current mothers are going to be drawn to pastel colors and crisp design, not blocky layout. Columns only work on blog sites nowadays and for tech specs.

The color choice needs to be rethought.

The fonts need to be different and bigger. Think 24-30pt Helvetica Neue or Lucida Grande, not Tahoma or whatever is there now.

The landing page should not have news updates or other stuff in prominent display. It should have a promotion of the week/month/whatever or new product that is readily visible immediately. The updates and such can be at the bottom of the page.

Appreciate the comments all. I'll take another run at it this week and get back to youse guyz.

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Originally Posted by Calliander

Columns only work on blog sites nowadays and for tech specs.

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That's just blatantly false. Column layouts are used in nearly every site on the web in one facsimile or another. I'd actually be amazed if you should show me an example of a site without columns being used.

Another recommendation is significantly tweak the tertiary navigation on the products page. At a glance it's extremely difficult to distinguish what section you are currently on. Giving the navigation a selected state (aside from the down arrow) would be a solid start, as well as making the second level nav stand out more. I also like Mike's idea of putting an e-spot on the homepage as opposed the "updates", especially considering the products are what you should be featuring and not "updates". Which is where the dedicated updates page could come in handy.

Oh, and make sure to cross browser test, your footer is a mess in IE6. :)

I did a lot of newborn designs at Disney last year, and they made me look through the following sites. I'd recommend getting your boss to do the same if he won't budge on some of the color/design choices. Sometimes if you can show a quasi-proof of concept, it helps them let go:

http://www.pumpkinpatchusa.com/
http://www.gap.com/browse/division.do?cid=43184
http://www.gap.com/browse/division.do?cid=5997
http://www.babiesrus.com/shop/index....=PPC:204310368

What Calliander said about colors is true - soft pastels is a strong point. Also, why not have pull the green out of the middle circle of the logo? You could use the negative space in it, color the top and bottom circles their own colors, and infer a "mother cradling a child" in that kind of treatment. Right now it just feels like planets orbiting each other.

Right now it definitely feels professional, but for a different industry. Like health, pharmaceuticals, marketing, engineering, etc. As long as you can convince your boss that a mother-oriented site needs to play up to mother's sensibilities, you should be able to make more leeway in shifting focus on the project.

I have a giant list of kids clothing sites (a cheat-sheet from back in the day). If I can find it I'll link to some more mother/maternity/newborn pages.

I actually really liked the site, but I think the "...and those wonderful first years of watching your baby grow." portion on the left is out of place. It feels like there should be more there, like a picture or something besides open space.
Overall I like the colors and the feel of the site. Nice job sir.

I know the babies are probably just stock photos, but I'm just not feeling it. Is it in the budget to do a shoot with the Aborigines using the products, using the car seats to carry firewood, setting crocodile traps with the exercisers, and such. I think that would really sell the product.

I think Doc is on to something here. I can see that site in my mind, and it is a wonderful place.

Would it work if I shot white people with blackface on?

Depends.
Are you shooting white people while you are in blackface
or
Are you shooting white people while they are in blackface?

The second option.

Also, I dunno if I could get kids in blackface. So it would be:

Adults, in blackface, in baby furniture / gear.

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Originally Posted by Cowutopia

Why is there a tilde over the e in secure, in green?

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Keeps the Mexicans confused, ensuring they can't steal anything.

thread takeover.

help people, what do you guys think of the web site?

http://brianmoreno.com/

I'm no expert, but I didn't hate it.

it's okay. there isn't anything bad about it at all (in a way). but for someone in a creative industry it's also a little bit too... dry. There isn't a lot of art on display on your site, and your photography / work isn't front row centre as it should be.

Here are some cool photography and portfolio websites from artists (primarily photographers) where the actual layout and visual design of the site says something about the artist (from the very first page). You also need to separate out things in to stuff like EDITORIAL, and PORTRAITS. It's more important for me as a potential customer to see what you can do based on what I need. The Sony press conference at E3 photos and the US Open Xtreme Sports events are both live-action and you do great work with both. Put them together under live events. Small stuff like that will increase navigation and the click-through rates (always play to your strengths).

It doesn't have to be flash or fancy (in fact I don't particularly like flash), but as someone who actually hires photographers from time to time I always like it when a photographer can show he knows a thing or two about design and art. That way I know if I give you money I can expect some creativity and expertise in return.

http://www.davidaarontroy.com/
http://www.reynardli.com/Site/home.html
http://www.stevenwohlwender.com/
http://www.kakofonia.com/home.aspx?language=2
http://www.gregorymillerphotography.com/

I literally just took 2 minutes in my design resource folder in Firefox and found these sites.

Your site is okay from a technical standpoint. It works, and is clean and professional. it's just not creative enough and too conservative for an artistic market like you're in. You need to pump that shit way up to 11.

It's a Wordpress theme, that's why it's dry. Technically it's well put together, and has nice features, but from a visual standpoint you can go to that theme's page and see a handful of sites that look EXACTLY like it. And while it isn't horrible looking, it just isn't original.

Drew hit the nail on the head with his assessment, you need to emphasize the style of your work through the site as well as keeping your photography as the focal point.

But his creativity only goes to 10?

His faggotry goes to 11!

I just hate flash web sites.

What i love is the tiled look of that layout, but its definitely something that needs a lot more customization, i dont know that i like the colors it has right now, ect.

I don't particularly like flash on sites for no reason, either. But there are easy ways to achieve a different look. I know you used a theme for it, but for a PORTFOLIO site it's way too "media-IGN-ish". Everything in your field is so much about pronounced style -- portfolio websites are no exception.

Drew's 100 percent correct here. You won't stand out in your field with that site. It's functional but bland. Just screams "template."

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Originally Posted by Drewbacca

http://www.davidaarontroy.com/
http://www.reynardli.com/Site/home.html
http://www.stevenwohlwender.com/
http://www.kakofonia.com/home.aspx?language=2
http://www.gregorymillerphotography.com/

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:o

The first two speak to me

The fourth one feels like mine with more edge to it

Im not a graphic designer and i forgot HTML ect 5 years ago, so i dont know where else to go.

You have a trade. Find a designer and barter with them: free photography for free design and programming. Find a student designer, too, and you could probably spend 250 bucks and get it done if you needed to. They need to pad their portfolio with actual real-world work more than they need a pay cheque.

any particular reason you have both prototype and jquery running

Because whoever wrote the wordpress theme sucks, is my guess.

http://www.erwinolaf.com/

Check out this site, Brian. Remove the flash and the design could still be functional in basic HTML / PHP (with a database). I am in talks with this man right now about a potential photoshoot and his simplistic site really helped me make a decision over some other photographers. His photography is organized by collection and style. Browsing it is perfect.

It doesn't hurt that he's an amazing photographer, either.

Everything about that site works and makes me jealous :'(

http://www.infa-secure.com.au/

Revised front page. I still need to sort the right and left hand columns out so it doesn't look so unfinished.

Changed the menu from flash to java. Added a blogging system to the front page so I can post updates a lot easier. Still not happy with the actual visual design, but the guy who pays me says he loves it and not to change it.

KLJdlakjfldsajfhsdlkfjsdafkjdsalfkasdfsad.

The functionality is improved 10 fold by getting rid of the flash. The scroller to the right is flash, but nowadays you can find news scrollers and customize them to do the same thing.

The site doesn't really fit the branding is my general thing with it. The logo is modern and uses an icon style logo, while the overall design of the site is kind of gradienty and dry. That's why it's important to get your messaging and branding down pat before branching out. I've run in to the same problem with sites (in fact, one I'm working on right now!) People don't usually get it until they see it your way after the fact.

I really like it Detour. Everything I clicked worked really well, I enjoy the color scheme, and above all the overall design. I'm in no way an expert on these kinds of things, but for me the whole thing works out nicely. Great job! :tu:

I'm throwing my blog into the mix.

This is what it currently looks like. I've gotten a number of compliments on it and I'm mostly happy with it, it being a simple blog. But I'm trying to make it look less bloggy, more magaziney, and have been slowly putting together a new design.

Here is the new look.

A couple of notes. 1) There are two designs that page, the home page design and the article page design--the two layouts are separated by the copyright footer--obviously, they won't both appear on the same page when I'm done. Just doing this for the design process. 2) Browser compatibility is focked with this mock, so use Firefox. I've got a more compatible version already, but it's much less complete. 3) The large image at the top of each page is unique to each article. The same photo will inevitably be duplicated in the post body in full, non-cropped form. I don't think the redundancy will look bad, but let me know if you disagree. 4) I'm aware that on the home page design, the "Other articles" white boxes don't line up with the images above them. This will be fixed.

Looks good! What are you using to allow your pictures to be viewed like that? the thing I'm using is slowwww, i dont like it. It looks just fine on safari BTW

I have been tweaking things about mine lately, i think it looks better now, but still havent rid myself of the wordpress plain i guess.

www.BrianMoreno.com

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Originally Posted by B-Ri

Looks good! What are you using to allow your pictures to be viewed like that? the thing I'm using is slowwww, i dont like it. It looks just fine on safari BTW

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It's a script called FancyZoom. It's a bit buggy--sometimes never loads the picture, sometimes displays wrong photo or stretches the photo to the wrong aspect ratio, but when it works I love it. I've looked for an equivalent without the bugs but there's nothing as nice--there's a JQuery version of the script that may be less buggy, but it's not as smooth.

Do people really want to know that you had a vitamin water for lunch?

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Originally Posted by Cowutopia

Do people really want to know that you had a vitamin water for lunch?

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Men see pastrami, women see Vitamin Water. It's a test.

Looks nice, but a bit too corporate-y. I would think mom's would something a little lighter in tone. Maybe some different colors and fonts? I dunno, good work though.

A'ight dawgs, it's pretty much done. Couldn't get the related posts plugin to work tonight so at the bottom of posts the "Keep reading" just points to categories instead of similar articles. Hoping to fix that soon. But everything else I'm pretty happy with. I was able to do everything I wanted with the redesign.

The gray text in the boxes at the bottom is hard to read.

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Originally Posted by K3V

The gray text in the boxes at the bottom is hard to read.

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Thanks for the feedback. I've checked it on a number of monitors and even my phone and the gray is perfectly readable. It is intentionally subtler than the darker text, though I certainly don't intend for it to be difficult to read. Anyone else find it tough to read?

Figured out the related posts plugin and even moved the blog to its own domain this weekend.

I wouldn't say it is difficult to read, but it is close. Perhaps just a little bit darker, but not too much, cause I see why you want it to be subtle and it works. Just maybe a tad bit darker.

I mean, if you want people to have to work to read the text on your page that's fine, but it's not something I'd want to do. Contrast = good.

I agree with K3V & ElCapichan. I had to focus slightly more to read the text down there and unless it was something I really wanted to read I'd just skip over all of it if I was coming to your site for the first time. I like the idea of it being subtle but it just needs to be a tad darker.

Thanks for the feedback guys, I've darkened the font a bit, I think without compromising the look I was going for.

It's definitely better now. I think the problem before was that, at least on my monitor, if I wasn't looking dead straight on at the text, from any other angle it would blend in with the background. It still does that ever so slightly, but from angles that nobody would use when actually trying to browse a sight and read whats there.

One thing that's weird is that the same shade of gray font showed up fine on the light gray background of the main body of a page, but showed up fainter on the pure white--even though the contrast is greater.

I redesigned dat shit again. Behold: Ninja 250 Blog 3.0

Would love some feedback, especially from Drew and Josh 'cause they/you usually make good criticisms.

I'm no web design specialist, but I like it anyways.

A fun CSS experiment.

If you're handy with code and curious how I did it, check the source. Each "orb" is simply: <div>Text</div>

And if you're using MSIE it probably looks stupid as hell and I DON'T CARE.

It doesn't work on my Mac's Firefox - but it looks good in Safari.

I updated my browser. It works now -- on the older ones it just looked like squares with popping rollover states on them. Your drop shadows are pretty extreme!

I don't see shit on my iPad but a grid of blue circles with text. I assume they're doing something awesome on a different browser.

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Originally Posted by Josh

I don't see shit on my iPad but a grid of blue circles with text. I assume they're doing something awesome on a different browser.

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That's all it is really. They change colors/styles if you roll your mouse over them, but iPad ain't got no mouse.

What makes the orbs kinda neat is that they're all CSS-generated. No images, and it's all a single <div>. I read that you can use the :before and :after tags to do shit like the double border and went from there--the glare/highlight circle, the radial pseudo-gradient, rounded corners into a circle. The rollovers use CSS transitions for smooth style changing/animation. Just having fun with CSS.

I wasn't shitting on you or anything! I'm just to lazy to get off my couch.

It's amazing what you can do with Javascript mixed with CSS3 and HTML5 now. Once LTE network speeds hit everywhere you'll probably see full-on in-browser gaming. Android also announced they're going to allow the phone to act as a controller for PCs, too. Interesting stuff - "the internet of things" approaches us quickly.

Yeah, I need to learn javascript and HTML5, fast.

Not that fast, but yeah. I've been studying it in school since September and picked it up rather easily. Dynamic HTML is your friend once you're mastered DOM manipulation. I'm better at that than CSS positioning right now -- but to be fair I haven't used CSS nearly as much.

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Originally Posted by Drewbacca

Interesting stuff - "the internet of things" approaches us quickly.

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Its all possible. We just have to wait for industry to start churning the stuff out. The technology is already available to be able to control most any device with text messages. And it becomes even easier and more user friendly when you introduce a visual OS. In the next 5 years, you should be able to control any appliance in your house with a phone, computer, or touch pad.

Yeah, you've been able to do all of that for a while... part of why most of us were loling at your little science project where you "invented" a way to do it. www.smarthome.com

For a demonstration in class me (and several other group members) got a paper shredder to talk remotely with our android phone. You sent it a SHRED text and it would turn on and shred anything in it. Kind of a stupid test, but a proof of concept nontheless. The internet of things is actually just everything talking to each other -- kind of like Avatar as silly as it seems. Just not "natural". Displaying text on walls and construction materials, desks, projections, etc. Standardizing the base languages these things talk in to is natural - augmented enhancements will be next in the future (probably distant), too. Information is going to be advancing at such a rampant rate you'll need digital enhancements to process and keep up.

It's evolution, baby.

But it's decades away from that. We'll probably be old as fuck or middle aged at best. But that's the way it is.

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Originally Posted by Drewbacca

once you're mastered DOM manipulation.

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A skill Doc is still trying to obtain.

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Originally Posted by Drewbacca

For a demonstration in class me got a paper shredder to talk remotely with our android phone.

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This is what you sound like.

I like pirates, what can I say?

I and I was thinking more Jamaican.

Alright-easy!